India-UK migration pact may be hard to enforce but visa deal a boon for young Indian professionals
- A similar proposal for India to take back some of the thousands of its citizens living illegally in Britain fell through in 2018
- Under the new pact, New Delhi can send up to 3,000 young Indian professionals to work in Britain each year
Migration has long been a fractious issue between the two countries, with a similar proposal unravelling in 2018 following disagreements over the extradition process. At the time, London claimed there were as many as 100,000 Indians living illegally in Britain, but Delhi pegged the figure at half of that.
Identifying where an undocumented migrant actually came from “and which ones are indeed Indian” poses a major problem for British authorities, according to Bhim Adhikari, a Delhi-based advocate who specialises in immigration law.
“An Indian person’s physical resemblance to, say, somebody from Bangladesh, Nepal or Pakistan will add to the challenge of law enforcement agencies,” he said.
Abhinav Kant, a 41-year-old IT consultant who migrated to London from India in 2010, said another issue stemmed from the fact that many people living in Britain illegally “know how to work the system”.
