London: Britain plans to impose a 500 Pounds surcharge on each of the 90,000 migrants entering the country every year to work, stay or join family members.

The surcharge is expected to raise 450 million Pounds year, a quarter of the 1.8 billion Pounds annual cost of Britain's immigrant and asylum system, 'The Guardian' reported today (Dec 8, 2003).

Home Office officials have justified the move to surcharge migrants saying that they make a "windfall gain through being granted access to the UK labour market".

"Economic migrants benefit in many ways working in the UK, over and above a higher salary expectation, and it is appropriate to pass on some of the costs of these benefits on to migrants through a further one-off charge upon application," says a Home Office background document.

"Similarly there are sound economic and presentational grounds for considering additional charges. It is both fair and economically efficient that Government in raising revenue should look to appropriate the windfall gain that migrants derive."

The 500 Pounds is on top of the 125 Pounds for work permits now being phased in. The surcharge is in the small print of Home Secretary David Blunkett's Immigration and Asylum Bill, which gets its second reading in the Commons next week.

PTI