Thanks to the new system, the Home Office believes, it will become easier for young people with a good education to enter the United Kingdom. The system is similar to those in force in the USA, Canada and Australia. Its development was first announced in February last year; if adopted, it will come into force no earlier than mid-2007.
The Home Office plans to divide all immigrants into five categories - depending on a combination of several factors, including work qualifications and income level.
The highest rank will include highly educated specialists with good skills in their field - doctors, engineers, programmers, financiers - who will be able to come to Britain for permanent residence without having a prior job offer. This right is proposed only for migrants in the first category.
The second will include qualified nurses, teachers and administrators with sufficient work experience. They will be able to stay in the United Kingdom if they find work in a sector where there is a shortage of staff in Britain itself. However, even having a prior job offer will not guarantee them the right to enter.
The third category will include low-skilled workers, who will receive work visas for a specific period needed to perform their specific duties, with the mandatory condition of leaving the country after the contract ends.
Students and representatives of certain special groups - such as athletes or employees of international companies based in the United Kingdom - will make up the fourth category. The fifth will include migrants visiting the country on a "short visit" - such as musicians or people coming to Britain to work during their holidays.
At the same time, the Home Office stresses that representatives of the third, fourth and fifth categories will only be allowed entry if the states of which they are citizens have appropriate official arrangements with the United Kingdom. Such agreements include documents on illegal immigration and on the return of people who have been refused refugee status.
Opposition representative Damian Green, who holds the post of shadow Home Office minister for immigration in the shadow Conservative cabinet, said that the Tories welcome immigration because it enriches the country economically and culturally. "In principle, we have been proposing some kind of points system for quite some time, so I hope it will work," Green said in an interview with the BBC. "But the main question is whether it can be effectively implemented."
The opposition representative called the system proposed by the head of the British Home Office "rather chaotic, suggesting that the government apparently does not have even the most basic facts." "They cannot give the number of illegal immigrants in this country even within 200,000," Damian Green said.