According to him, these changes will be a response to recent events that revealed weaknesses in the immigration and nationality department of the relevant ministry. Reid's predecessor as Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, was forced to resign in May after it emerged that over a thousand foreign prisoners serving sentences in British prisons were not deported from the country upon release, as required by procedure.
The UK authorities plan to establish clearer cooperation between state penitentiary and immigration units, and also to reduce the processing time for deportation and asylum cases to six months. Within five years, nine out of ten asylum cases should be processed within this timeframe. In turn, those who are legally required to be deported from the UK will undergo this procedure within six months of their arrival.
By 2008, the UK plans to issue biometric visas to citizens of countries that are in the highest risk group for illegal migration. It is expected that by 2014, immigration control on exit from the UK, abolished in the 1990s, will be reinstated. Currently, only random document checks are carried out on departure, without any passport stamps.
One of the most noticeable upcoming innovations will be a new uniform for immigration authorities, who currently work in civilian clothes. Officers working at immigration control desks in UK ports and airports will don uniforms in the coming years.
To implement the planned changes, the UK authorities intend to increase spending on immigration operations to £280 million (double the current year) by the 2009-2010 financial year.
Incidentally
In the two years after EU enlargement, about 450,000 migrants from new EU member states came to the UK for work. According to published UK government data, from May 1, 2004 to June 30, 2006, over 447,000 people came to the UK from eight Eastern European countries (Cyprus and Malta are not included in the counts).
These figures only reflect the number registered with the UK Home Office for work in the country. 427,000 of the arrivals received permission to work in the UK. The majority - over 264,000 people (62%) - are from Poland. The number of people who crossed the border and work in the UK illegally or semi-legally cannot be counted.
In 2004, only three EU countries - the UK, Ireland, and Sweden - allowed migrants from new EU countries to freely come and work. The other states imposed a number of restrictive measures to avoid collapsing their own labor markets. However, at that time the UK government did not expect such a flow of Eastern Europeans wanting to find work here. London expected about 15,000 migrants per year. This figure was exceeded by 12-14 times, and the phrase 'Polish plumber' became a byword for labor from the former Soviet bloc.
In this regard, the opposition Conservative Party of the UK called for limiting the influx of migrants from Eastern Europe, especially in light of the expected accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the European Union in 2007.
UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Alistair Darling in response said that migration would be 'properly regulated'. He suggested that after the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU, the 'open door' policy would most likely not continue.
Since 2004, the situation on the UK labor market has changed, and there is now a rise in unemployment among native Britons. According to experts, immigrants from Eastern Europe may be partly 'to blame' for this. At the same time, other analysts argue that Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, and other citizens of new EU countries take on jobs that are not popular among Britons themselves, thus helping the UK economy.
This is exactly the conclusion of a study commissioned by the UK government late last year and published, among others, in the Financial Times. 'The economic impact of migration from new EU member states was small but generally positive,' the document says. 'There are no noticeable statistical indicators' that migrants from Central and Eastern Europe affected the rise in the number of British unemployed, according to the results of a study by the UK Department for Work and Pensions, conducted in connection with the 2005 increase in unemployment in the UK by 90,000 people.
In addition, it turned out that the geography of British unemployment and its breakdown by economic sector differ significantly from the employment data for Eastern Europeans.
Based on materials from RIA Novosti