No blanket amnesty to illegal immigrants: UK

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Ruling out a blanket amnesty to over 4 lakh illegal immigrants, Britain has said it will deal with the issue on case by case basis while it sought cooperation from Indian community to make the controversial new points-based immigration system "fair and stable".

"Over 1,000 case workers are currently engaged in making decisions on case by case," Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said at a seminar on immigration organised by the Ethnic Minority Citizens Forum in London on Thursday night.

Faced with a barrage of complaints about the "disastrous" impact of the new immigration system on Indian restaurants in the UK and the accute shortage of low-skilled workers in the curry houses, the minister said the current visa system needed an overhauling as it was "clumsy, outdated and wretched."

He sought cooperation from the Chinese and Indian communities to make the new points-based immigration system "fair and stable". At the moment there were 80 different ways in which immigrants could come to the UK.

"We want to make the immigration system simpler, fair and stable," Byrne, who recently took a cross-party delegation of Asian community leaders to India, said.

The points-based system will allow non-European migrants in the country only if they can prove that there is shortage of their skills in the UK and has been criticised as discriminatory.

Byrne said he would publish a blueprint of the new immigration system in a month's time. Besides, the Migration Advisory Committee, an independent committee, will publish a list showing occupational shortages.

The Minister, however, rejected a proposal for a cap on immigration.

"I reject emphatically that there should be a cap on immigration. There are over tens of thousands of students in Britain contributing 8.3 billion pounds student fee annually and how can we put a cap on them," Byrne asked.

On complaints of series of raids conducted by the Enforcement Directorate on Bangladeshi-run Indian restaurants here during the last few days, Byrne said he would talk to the Director of Enforcement about it.

During the seminar, some of the hotel representatives claimed that the 10,000-strong Indian restaurant industry, with a turn-over of 3.5 billion pounds annually and employing 250,000 persons directly or indirectly, was on the verge of collapse owing to accute shortage of low-skilled workers and sporadic raids by enforcement directorate to detect illegal workers.