UK immigration: Keir Starmer government wants to cut overseas hiring by technology, engineering companies

In what could be a possible bad new for the aspiring Indian techies, the Keir Starmer government in the United Kingdom (UK) wants to curb overseas hiring by technology and engineering companies and has asked independent advisers on migration to review the sectors’ reliance on skilled worker visas. 

Home secretary Yvette Cooper has asked the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to review these sectors’ reliance on skilled worker visas. Cooper said there is need to understand why certain key occupations depend heavily on international recruitment.  

The home secretary specifically pointed to information technology and telecommunications professionals, as well as engineering professionals, as sectors that have been among the top users of work visas. 

While the government was “very grateful for the contribution that people from all over the world make to our economy... the system needs to be managed and controlled”, the home secretary wrote in a letter to the MAC. 

Yvette Cooper said that the government aims to reduce migration by aligning immigration with skills policy to create a fairer and more coherent approach to the labour market. 

She asked the MAC to report within nine months on how the immigration system “could be used more effectively” to spur employers to focus on recruitment from the domestic workforce. 

Drop in UK visa applications 

The number of overseas workers and students applying to come to the UK has fallen after curbs on visas introduced by the former government led by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party. 

Workers and their family members applying on skilled worker, health and care, and study visas fell by more than a third in July to 91,300 compared with last year, The Guardian reported. 

The University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory has estimated that net migration will continue to drop considerably in the next five years to about 350,000 by 2030, driven in part by more people leaving Britain, declines in the number of overseas students arriving in the UK, and a fall in private sector vacancies, the report added. 

The overall number of people applying to come to the UK as skilled workers, healthcare workers or to study has fallen from 143,000 in July 2023 to 91,300 in July 2024 – a drop of 36 percent.