An immigration system can serve more than one purpose. It can regulate migration while also helping determine whether businesses can access the talent they need to support investment, research and growth.
For much of the past three years, UK immigration policy has focused heavily on reducing migration. Successive reforms have tightened eligibility across the legal migration system, and recent statistics suggest those policies have achieved their immediate objective.
Increasingly, however, a different question is emerging: what economic purpose should individual immigration routes serve?
The further widening of access to the Global Talent visa illustrates that evolution. It also has particular relevance for pharmaceutical, biotech and other research-intensive businesses competing internationally for the people needed to research, develop and commercialise new technologies.
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