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Shyam Bhatia India Abroad Correspondent in London
Britain's newly appointed Home Secretary David Blunkett plans to introduce an American-style 'green card' system to check illegal immigration.
The move will streamline entry procedures for workers, such as the 10,000 Indian IT specialists who were allowed into Britain last year to boost the country's share of the new economy.
Sources close to Blunkett said he is motivated by a desire to crack down on those who masquerade as asylum seekers in order to find jobs at the expense of the local population.
The sources say Blunkett believes the flood of asylum seekers is a potentially explosive political issue that could undermine the government's popularity.
"It is the poor people living in council estates (social housing) who come up against asylum seekers who move into the black economy and who take their jobs," the sources added.
"They are the ones who feel the impact and this is where the tension is generated over illegal immigration."
Blunkett's plan is to imitate the US green card system to allow selective entry of foreign workers for specified periods of time. At the end of that period they would have to leave. A ceiling on numbers, enforced by rigorous enforcement, would control and legitimise economic migration.
During the recently concluded general election, Labour politicians attacked opposition Conservative plans to lock up asylum seekers in detention centres while their applications were processed.
Since then Blunkett has come up with his own package of ideas to streamline immigration. "There are those, for example, who advocate uncontrolled immigration," he said last week, "but the impact on their lives would be limited. It is the lower paid workers who, having just achieved a minimum wage, experience the impact of illegal immigration."
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