Last week there were press reports that the government was going to ‘massage’ the immigration figures by shortening the short term Intra Company Transfer (ICT) route to less than one year so as to take 20,000 out of the immigration figures [1].
However, by no means all will be coming for a full year thus qualifying as immigrants under the United Nations definition of a long term international migrant. Even if they are counted in as immigrants they should be counted out as emigrants the following year and thus have no impact on the government’s net migration target.
This looks more like a house keeping exercise by the Home Office to better demarcate visas between ‘immigrant and ’non-immigrant’ rather than an exercise to fiddle the figures.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10726132/Theresa-May-tweaks-visa-system-in-move-that-will-reduce-net-migration.html
