Hacker News Reader

There are ways for non EU folks to come here settle here. I'm not up on the details as they keep changing but basically if you come here to do a degree/masters they tend to let you stay on and work after and if you stick 10 years you can apply for UK citizenship. There's some sort of earnings requirement like you have to be making over £30k or something like that and be paying tax. I'm not sure it matters if the earnings come from employment or your own business.

(some bumph here http://www.workpermit.com/news/2013-11-15/uk-immigration-min...). The norm seems to be to do a masters and then stay on with a job, then you could do a startup if you can get funding / customers to pay a suitable salary I think. I've got a couple of friends, one Indian, one Chinese here that way.

Sadly not. It's just another way of obtaining a Tier 2 (General) visa, which comes with all the restrictions I have described. Telling somebody they can stick around for 5/6 years, contributing taxes and economic growth, starting a family, etc. but that they can't start their own business, and they may be told to leave in the end through no fault of their own, is a very lopsided proposal.

EDIT: prior to 2010, there was a highly skilled migrant programme. You would be allowed to perform any kind of work in the UK, provided you met certain requirements. So you could arrive, work a highly skilled position and build a side business. Sure, it could fail, but at least that's through your own fault and you'd be working on it from day 1 so you'd find out sooner or later if you should remain or not.

Today, you cannot do this. You have to hang around for 5/6 years, hope you get indefinite leave to remain (ILR), and only then are you allowed to start a business. But you might be refused ILR, and then you have to leave. It's a nonsensical policy when you consider people's private lives are involved.

Most UK employers don't allow side business.

good luck enforcing that

get caught and they will fuck you over and you will be shit out of luck in court.

There is the Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) visa, though it's not at all straight-forward - you need £200k investment, or £50k under conditions that I'm not sure it's possible to actually meet.

https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-entrepreneur/overview

Right, just a 200k investment :) This belies a very specific view of how enterpreneurship works. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple... none of these companies would have met a similar requirement in their times. Furthermore, by the time most people have 200k to investment a business they're likely to have settled in a geographically locked private life.

It's not like in the US it would've been much easier for a foreigner: for an E2 Visa you're expected to have 100k-150k$

I'm not discussing the US? I'm expressing my hope that the UK returns to its more sensible pre-2010 highly skilled migrant policy.

Sure, I completely agree with the sentiment.

I just pointed it out since you used 4 US companies as examples, and I thought you could be implying that it could be easier to start a company there for a foreigner.

So how do you suggest they tell someone is really an entrepreneur? Genuine question.

£200k is not a very huge amount of money by London standards. Maybe fully loaded cost of 2 senior developers for a year, if you get creative making it stretch.

Any threshold below that would effectively be a open doors situation.

Personally I'm for making immigration easier but how necessary is it for businesses considering that they can hire from anywhere in EU with very few hurdles? Are there really many people outside the EU that are so skilled that an alternative can't be found within the EU?

well, hiring from silicon valley for one thing

But my point is that the hiring pool is already huge (the entire EU). Are there lots of people in SV who want to move to London and who have skills that nobody in the EU does?

I'm in South Africa. I work for a global company with offices in London. I have very specific knowledge that makes me a natural candidate for employment by the London office that nobody in the EU would have. But I have private life and certain freedoms here in South Africa, which I have to give up to work in the UK under the current visa scheme. I would have to terminate all my side projects that earn revenue, and only work on non-income generating projects - or perhaps become a couch potato.

How does that benefit the UK, bearing in mind I can easily get the visa with these restrictions? All the UK is going to end up with, under this policy, is a majority of migrants with no dreams to do anything bigger than what their boss tells them to do.

Thanks. Like I said in the original comment I'm for opening up immigration. I just wonder how many people there are like you. Are there enough to convince government the spend the time and money to change the immigration laws.

Add me to that list. Also from South Africa.

> Are there enough to convince government the spend the time and money to change the immigration laws

I'm expressing my hope that the UK returns to the pre-2010 highly skilled migrant policy. There was a reason for that policy; had they not stuffed around with it to make a particularly weak political statement, this situation wouldn't exist to rectify.

Can you not get an intra company transfer?

And cant move on intra company transfer

According to e.g. the CEO of Citibank [1] and the mayor of London [2], immigration reform would really benefit the UK. The OECD suggests that there's no reason not to [3].

However, it's more complicated than that. The current policy is actively deterring young, skilled people from developing their skills and connections in the UK, which is a great concern for the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee [4] - who clearly understands that immigration is a long-term process, and governments can't treat people like sheep if they hope to attract talent.

If you were 30, about to start a family, would you immigrate knowing that you're not allowed to make money from tinkering on a side project for the next 5/6 years? And that after that time you wouldn't even be sure if you and your family could remain in the UK? It's a tough decision. And yet the best of the best are exactly in that position -- the people who tinker on the side are exactly the people who become the best, not the ones doing a 9-5 day job.

The irritating thing is that the policies were great prior to 2010, until Cameron decided to make a policy of reducing immigration to levels that are simply impossible ("tens of thousands"). His only way to control immigration is non-EU immigration, which is a very small percentage of actual UK immigration. It turns out that just a few days ago the government has finally started to acknowledge the sham [5], after years of criticism. Unfortunately in the meantime, people have to make very difficult life changing decisions in the face of this political drama.

[1] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-06-27/minister-uk-will-n...

[2] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-06-17/london-mayor-londo...

[3] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-05-23/migration-is-econo...

[4] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-04-14/lords-denounce-uks...

[5] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-09-17/deputy-pm-uk-has-s...

The only way it would benefit the UK would be by maintaining or further lowering the already low tech wages.

This is not to be encouraged.

Hang on, you are working in Australia from the UK, you asshole. There are few things more absurdly hypocritical than emigrants who complain about immigration.

I was for a while yes. Difference being that in Australia businesses are crying out for employees and there's enough money to pay everyone properly. In the UK the only shortage is the shortage of people willing to work for peanuts. I'm not anti immigration. I'm against business opening it up further to suppress already low wages.

But you are complaining about a suggestion to change the migration rules to make it easier for migrants to start businesses while here, which would increase the competition for employees and raise wages.

The data in my [3]rd link does not support your belief.

yes given that you have all the eu to recruit from there is no real justification for the skill shortage argument.