UK Edition
The number of Turks seeking to come and work in the UK has more than tripled in a year as they seek to exploit the exodus of Europeans after Brexit, official figures show.
There were more than 37,000 applications from Turks in the year to June – up from 9,000 in the year to March 2020 and putting Turkey on a par with India for work visa applicants.
Both Turkey and India had more than double the number of applications for UK work visas of any other nation, with Ukraine the nearest to them on 15,000, followed by the Philippines on 11,000 and the USA on 9,000.
The surge has been fuelled by changes to the UK immigration rules which have seen the ending of a long-standing UK-Turkey agreement on work visas and a new post-Brexit regime that has lifted the cap on skilled workers from non-EU countries.
The race to enter the UK peaked at 20,000 applications in the last quarter of last year, just before the deadline for the closure of the Ankara agreement at the end of the Brexit transition period on Dec 31.
The Ankara agreement, dating back to 1963, is designed to enable business people, entrepreneurs and skilled workers from Turkey to apply for work visas with the prospect of being granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK after five years.
"There was a huge demand to beat the deadline and there were a lot of last-minute applications," said Vatan Oz, editor of the London-based Avrupa Gazette, which he founded after he came to the UK in 1996.
He said the exodus was also driven by critics of the Erdogan regime and professional people in Turkey seeking to flee the country, adding: "There is a huge pressure on secular modern democratic people – doctors, students and others – because they don’t want to live in Turkey. Over 60,000 or 70,000 have left Turkey in the last five to 10 years."
There was also the "pull factor" of a large Turkish diaspora, mainly in London, which has grown from 40,000 when Mr Oz arrived in England to more than 700,000 now.
It also coincided with the departure of many Europeans to their home countries – particularly workers from eastern European countries such as Poland, where the economy has been thriving in recent years. Official UK statistics show that around 150,000 Polish citizens have left the UK since the Brexit referendum.
The Government's new Brexit regime has not only lifted the cap on skilled workers but also reduced the salary threshold to £26,500, lowered the qualifications bar to include A-levels and similar technical qualifications and expanded the shortage occupation list.
"Of course there are more opportunities for Turks if Europeans leave the UK because of Brexit," said Ali Guden, a British-trained solicitor in Istanbul who has helped many Turkish clients move to the UK. "The Turks want to enter into the market, replacing the Europeans."
The irony is that the Leave campaign had warned that remaining in the EU could allow 76 million Turks to flood into Britain. Despite the surge, there are, however, relatively high rejection rates of Turkish business people lodging applications under the Ankara agreement.
Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said the scheme required applicants to submit a business plan along with all the relevant documentation.
"The fact the rejection rate is high suggests there was probably a reduction in the quality of applications. People putting in last-minute applications may have failed on the business documentation side of the application," she added.