The immigration card

The other skills story today is that the Government has changed the rules for non-EU residents wanting to migrate into the UK. Essentially, the UK has adopted the Australian points system, whereby highly educated people with skills the country needs are given far greater preference over less skilled people.

While this will undoubtedly wring some positive headlines from the more arid and nationalistic tabloids (who seem unaware that the entire history of the UK is one of immigration), the legislation has some worrying elements in the long-term. Graduates with good English, on £40,000 or the local equivalent, will be able to seek work, while skilled workers in shortage occupations will need a job offer prior to arrival. For everyone else, the door is closing.

Put another way, your skills are no more important than your ability to support yourself in the short term – not the most progressive, positive, or enlightened message to send the world, and certainly not the hallmark of an economy as strong as ours.

This is worrying for a number of reasons: first, it excludes people from poorer countries who may be equally highly skilled – which would include workers from emerging outsourcing destinations; second, because we already have a very successful programme for attracting skilled graduates and overseas students – it ain't broke, so why fix it?; third, because the financial bar is far higher than the earnings of average UK residents; and fourth, because it ignores our own recent, very successful history.

Many of the most skilled people in the UK today in technology, engineering, medicine, law, pharmaceuticals, finance, design, business and the media are the second or third generation children of less skilled migrants from India, Pakistan, and many other parts of the world.

Those parents and grandparents might not have had degrees or a record of academic excellence (like many parents of similar age), but they nevertheless helped regenerate countless towns and cities with their ambition and innovation.

Proponents point to the success of the Australian model, but Australia is a very different place to the UK: aside from its many attractions, much of it is uninhabitable, and it lacks the UK's stronger record of cultural and multi-ethnic diversity, despite its Asian populations and the recent government apology to indigenous Australians.

Can we really afford to say to the world: come to the UK, but only if you are European – or already more successful, more highly educated and wealthier than the average citizen? That will store up problems for our future prosperity, and people with the ambition to succeed will begin to look elsewhere for a place to establish themselves.

For many in the sourcing industry, that may also begin to undo relations with those emerging countries with whom our future prosperity lies. Ambitious people are attracted to countries such as the UK and the US because they can make a name for themselves in a vibrant economy, and because those opportunities do not exist at home – not because they want to retire to the beach.

If you thwart ambition and diversity for the sake of importing wealth, then you are either a fool, or 18 months from an election.