There is no doubt that the UK and Europe needs skilled migrant workers to plug that yawning skills gap, that gets ever bigger. So anything that will put them off relocating to the UK seems, at best, unwise. This is precisely what a recent UK government ruling threatened to do.

The UK government attempted to apply changes to HSMP (highly skilled migrant programme), introduced in December 2006, retrospectively and to migrants already in the UK. Changes in the points system means some migrants might no longer score enough points, so no longer be granted a visa even though they were under the old system.

The High Court recently overturned the retrospective application of the change and said: "The terms of the original scheme should be honoured and that there is no good reason why those already on the scheme shall not enjoy the benefits of it as originally offered to them."
This news must have been greeted with a hefty sigh of relief by many sectors of industry where skilled workers are badly needed such as health care, IT and engineering.

Politicians were certainly happy about it, the liberal democrats and conservatives supported the High Court's ruling.

If you were a highly skilled migrant – say with expertise in IT – and you had an inkling the UK government would let you relocate and then move the goal posts once you were there, you might consider taking your precious skills elsewhere, like the US for example.

Already the US gets the cream of skilled migrants – 55% - while the EU gets just 5%. But the EU needs 20m skilled workers over the next 20 years.
A recent report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), found that skilled migrants in the UK at present comprise 2.5% of the workforce (715,000), by 2012 that will rise to 2.8% (812,000).

Last year the EU recently unveiled its blue card scheme, a rival to the US's green card to attract migrants. The UK is also implementing a new five tier points system and the first tier – for general highly skilled migrants – is due to be fully implemented this summer.