Rethink policies: Punjabi professionals tell UK

Last week, UK saw a protest by the Highly Skilled Migrants group, representing over 600 doctors, engineers, teachers and IT professionals of non-European descent, amny of them Punjabis. The group has raised over £25,000 to challenge the Home Office in courts.
The backlash comes as a result of UK immigration laws being deemed as unfair to migrant workers. Professionals, who entered the UK on a Tier 1 (General) visa years ago, can apply for permanent residency status after 5 years of living in the UK. The visa category applying to Indian software professionals has been discontinued since 2010, and those who belong to this can still apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR), but only until April 2018. However, the group argues that hundreds of cases are being purposefully and unfairly delayed or refused based on a section of the UK Immigration Act which should actually apply to criminals and tax evaders.
Aditi Bhardwaj, one of the organisers of the protest defends the right of the group’s members to be able to apply for permanent residency: “These people have spent over a decade in the UK, working in highly reputed professions, many of which have serious employee shortages. They have devoted their professional lives contributing to the growth of Great Britain, contributing over £25billion towards its economy. They have made the UK their home, brought properties, invested in businesses. They are all law-abiding citizens. None have been convicted of any criminal offence”.
Randeep Singh Khalsa, based in Reading, has been in the UK for nearly 4 years now, working for a software company. The current policy regarding his Tier 2 ICT visa does not allow him to stay in the UK for more than 5 years, or switch to a general visa. Options for him involve moving from the UK to somewhere like India or Canada. Khalsa explains: “I am on a Tier 2 ICT and there is a cooling period of 12 months after. This is restricting me to stay here and continue my work even when my company is looking to extend further. Other countries are not having this limitation of 5 years. The UK government needs to re-think policies for people working here over a long period of their life, and who have family and kids receiving their schooling in the UK."
British Sikh MP Tan Dhesi and his fellow Labour party MP Seema Malhotra are among the Indianorigin parliamentarians who have expressed their support for the migrant group's protests.
Gopal Verma, a software engineer from London, who has been in the UK for 7 yrars explains: “By using discretionary 322(5) clause on applications of South Asians, the UK Home Office is shrewdly trying to achieve its lower immigration targets and to gain voters of right wing....The Home Office wants people to give up and leave the country. We will leave the country on our terms; not with ‘character assassination on our passport’. We will not get a Visa of any other country because they too will assume that we are ‘threat'