Restrictions on high skill immigration to Britain

From The Independent:

Russian-born physicist Professor Sir Andre Geim said new restrictions on non-European Union immigrants, including minimum salary requirements of at least £31,000 and tighter student visa rules, are blocking the brightest academics from working at British institutions. He told The Independent on Sunday that the restrictions would have prevented him and his team from identifying the revolutionary “super-material” graphene, which earned him the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010.

Sir Andre warned that future scientific breakthroughs at British institutions were at risk because of the tighter controls, introduced this year to bring down annual net migration from more than 200,000 to “tens of thousands”.

..Sir Andre, 54, first arrived in the UK in the early 1990s as a Russian citizen with a permit to work as a post-doctoral fellow at Nottingham University. His salary would have been around £27,000 in today’s money, meaning that he would have been barred from entry under the minimum salary requirement.

FYI, Geim is one of my favorite scientists of all time. He is the only individual to win both a Nobel prize, for graphene, and an Ig Nobel prize, for frog levitation. Awesome!

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