Foreign footballers and international businessmen are to be offered a £15,000 personalised visa renewal service to avoid them having to queue, as part of an increase in immigration fees announced yesterday.
Officials from the UK Border Agency will offer to visit highly skilled migrants at their office or home to sort out their immigration documents.
During the visit they will take the new “biometric” photograph and fingerprints and then provide an on-the-spot decision on whether the visa will be renewed.
The Home Office admitted that the £15,000 price is in excess of the £1,982 cost of providing the “mobile biometric enrolment and case-working” service.
Those who can and are willing to pay for immediate service should of course be charged for such. Straight old price discrimination, a good thing.
All we need to do now is add another level on top of this. For £100,000 we\’ll guarantee that you get the visa, not just a quick decision but the right decision.
If there are those willing to pay for the right to live and work here we should charge them to do so.
Yup. It’s a quick, easy and fair way for the UK to trade on being a good environment to do business in, to work in and so on. (Yeah, I know: Labour government, etc. But you know what I mean.)
It’s a better system for the immigration market than points or caps, because the labour market’s valuations are implicitly used to allow or deny entry. Points are administered by a bureaucratic system controlled by politicians: paid residency reduces state control of immigration by allowing them to control only one variable, the price.
And I don’t see that immigrants who will be worth the entry fee but unable to afford the up-front fee would be disadvantaged: I can well see that some canny commercial operators would see a profit in lending money to potential immigrants who were worth the investment.
Why doesn’t every foreign citizen applying for a visa to come to the UK, have to pay the full cost of having their security status checked out by the FCO? We keep hearing about how it is “impossible” for embassy staff to check out all the applicants, because they are “swamped”. They wouldn’t be overwhelmed if they had the staff to deal with that demand, and the way to raise the money to pay extra staff is to charge at least a break – even price for the visa.
Not sure about your £100,000 visa. How many immigration officials will be able to sit in a person’s house, clutching their £15,000 cheque and tell them to the face that they are not suitable.
I thought Labour had already adopted that policy. Don’t I recall a certain Labour minister intervening in visa applications a few years ago?
“How many immigration officials will be able to sit in a person’s house, clutching their £15,000 cheque and tell them to the face that they are not suitable.”
Who is it who does the licence fee: Crapita? Get them to do it; they’d probably laugh all the way through the interviews.
People who can afford £100k for a visa aren’t the problem. Under the new rules how will we get the people to do the low paid, low skilled, jobs that indigenous people feel beneath? Bearing in mind that the two parties likely to win the next election are promising to leave the benefits system untochued.
And just in case JohnB comes wandering by, I am referring to the criminal benefits withdraw rates and high tax allowance.
Al capone might have liked this idea.
But a really nulabor version would be to charge every English new born baby such an entrance fee to be paid off during life as an ‘assistance tax’.
Sounds like fertile ground for a racket of some kind.