India’s trade, talent pipeline under threat from Europe’s right-wing, populist surge

Visa access for short-term professional work is fundamentally different from permanent immigration, said TS Vishwanath, a principal adviser at international trade consultancy ASL-Legal in New Delhi. “But many governments feel they are similar”.

The numbers tell a stark story. Over the past two decades, the share of foreign-born workers in the UK workforce has more than doubled, from 9 per cent in 2004 to 19 per cent – around 6.2 million people – by the end of 2022, an Oxford University paper published early this year showed.

This influx has brought skilled talent from across the globe, including 250,000 Indians who arrived last year alone – around 127,000 for work and 115,000 for study.

Chinese and Pakistani workers have also flocked to Britain in recent years, to the tune of 90,000 and 83,000, respectively, according to a May report in The Economic Times, citing 2023 data from the UK’s Office of National Statistics.

Yet the rise of anti-immigration populists casts a pall of uncertainty over this professional pipeline.

The stakes could not be higher. India’s services exports – a US$323 billion juggernaut as of last year – have been the backbone of its economic growth for decades. Any disruption to the cross-border movement of talent that fuels this engine could have devastating ripple effects, both for India and the global economy at large.

“The Reform UK Party has come up as a source of worry,” said Biswajit Dhar, a professor at the Council for Social Development in New Delhi. “They will keep nudging the government towards a more hawkish stance on immigration.”

Indeed, with the spectre of anti-immigrant sentiment looming large, analysts agree that immigration policy is poised to be a dominant force on the British political