Yeah, this is a really stupid, cack-handed approach to immigration by the UK government. I've worked with some people that had to just through preposterous hoo

Yeah, this is a really stupid, cack-handed approach to immigration by the UK government. I've worked with some people that had to just through preposterous hoops to come and work in the UK – we're not talking unskilled labour, but skilled engineers, paying a whole lot of tax on their generous salaries. And it's a field in which is increasingly difficult to recruit talented individuals, too. Their positions are constantly in limbo and require IMO far too much paperwork in order to remain resident. Meanwhile, there is essentially no control over immigration from EU member states. There's a populist objection to immigration from the EU, because those flows are perceived to be primarily unskilled workers displacing domestic workers from low-paid jobs. It's not clear how much of a problem that actually is, but it's a common perception nonetheless. So we've a government elected after lots of loud promises to reduce net immigration. Since there's essentially nothing that they can do about immigration from within the EU, there is pressure to reduce net immigration from outside it, to 'make up the numbers'. I haven't looked at the statistics on this, but I'd wager that this disproportionately affects exactly the sort of immigration we want to see into the UK – highly-skilled foreign workers. One of the UK's strengths as a business base has traditionally been the ease of hiring internationally. Now we have an ass-backwards immigration policy which achieves exactly the opposite of what we want, primarily due to populist pandering. It's going to do nothing other than harm the UK's competitiveness in the short and long term.