By Andrew Donoghue, 12 July 2005 16:44
NEWS The chief executive of Autonomy attacked the UK government on Tuesday for what he claims is its "parochial" and "crazy" attitude to immigration.
Mike Lynch, founder of the search and knowledge management specialist who at the height of the dot-com boom became the UK's first internet billionaire, said that the UK's IT economy could be set back irrecoverably unless the government relaxes its current stance on allowing the "brightest and the best" to freely move into the country.
"The idea that a bright student from Africa may be stopped from entering this country is a shot in the foot for both the UK and Africa," said Lynch. "The current parochial attitudes to immigration in this country are just crazy."
Lynch made the comments at the second day of the Commonwealth Technology Forum 2005 in London.
Addressing an audience from places such as Africa, China, Europe and India, Lynch said that ideas of regional competition were outdated, and that international co-operation was the way forward.
"I don't believe in regional competition. Technology is always about co-operation. In the modern tech environment you need to be able to open up to the brightest and the best," said Lynch.
The current UK immigration system is widely seen as overly complicated. The government is committed to replacing it with a points-based system for migrants who wish to come to the UK to work or study. Under this plan, IT specialists would be counted as highly skilled, giving them enough points to enter the country without a job before finding work or setting up a business.
Lynch, whose company makes software designed to manage and organise unstructured data, also discussed future innovation and said that advances in storage would mean that it would soon be possible to catalogue an entire life from start to finish.
"We are about four years away from a disk drive that can store my entire life, based on a still shot every few seconds, and telephone phone quality audio."
Lynch also told the audience that he was pleased the European software patent directive had been rejected, dismissing it as "a very bad idea".
Andrew Donoghue writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
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1. anonymous
Don't fall for this - company bosses shouting shortages and howling for the best and brightest of other nations. In the US we saw hundreds of thousands of our best and brightest fired, and in many cases forced to train their foreign replacements as a condition of recieving severance money. It was dreadful to meet the foreign workers who came in - usually in positions vacated by fired Americans. Almost always their jobs and their skillsets were ordinary - not the best of breed they claim. Result: hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of US IT talent flushed down the can, replaced by people who were no better and often worse. There was no shortage of IT talent in your country or mine, and there isn't one now. Aftermath in the US: rapidly dropping enrollments in Computer Science and Engineering - our youth have seen that poverty and joblessness result from pursuing these fields, if you happen to be a local citizen. They learned this from watching what happened to their parents. Don't listen to this guy!!!!
2. Chris Stevens
The concept of allowing immigration to alien IT personnel without jobs is scary. Are the Foreign Office officials in Embassies oversea's capable of assessing IT skills before granting a visa? Perhaps the task should be undertaken by low paid sleepy eyed officials at the immigration desk at Heathrow airport?
There are plenty of highly skilled IT Professionals in the UK who can fill the posts. The only disqualification is that they are over 35 years old. What about all the IT personnel "released" by Offshoring.
3. Geoffrey Darnton
...and it gets worse .... I have a staggering case at the moment of the refusal of a visa in Bangkok for someone to make a 3-week visit, fully sponsored, to the UK who is working on a strategically important project, where some of the work has been outsourced to Thailand - all the Embassy can come up with to cover their unbelievably irrational refusal is to say that 'on the balance of probabilities' they do not believe the person will return to Thailand at the end of the short visit! - with no evidence whatsoever - so they even ignore the advice of UKvisas' own independent monitor. Wherever there are arbitrary powers it is vital to have safeguards in place - they are missing for cases like this, so the arbitrary exercise of power goes unchecked.
4. Mark Walsh
Absolute Rubbish...
Don't believe the words of a man who became the 'UK's first internet billionaire', how did he get there? I am quite sure it was on the backs of his workforce, by paying low wages and keeping them low. This latest rouse sounds like a nasty little word which should never rear its ugly head, never mind in the UK, and even more so in the IT industry, the work being EXPLOITATION.
IT wages have virtually stood still over the last decade at best while other industries healthily climb (we should have all became a builders shouldn't we). Why, the absolutely unnecessary introduction of cheap labour, people from abroad that have been already trained or have the relevant qualifications, but that are usually not any better, and very often worse than than the workers they are replacing, but they are cheap. And yes they are 'replacing' workers not filling jobs that are currently impossible to fill, this is total nonsense.
We have all been shafted over the last decade by this stance, negotiated by 'industry leaders' like Mike Lynch, and agreed by the seemingly blindfolded government, and here we go again, just as the market is starting to pick up again (not a coincidence methinks). It is people like Mike Lynch whom have the most to gain financially and the fact that Mr Lynch has become a billionaire over a very short period of time is substantial proof that he could easily afford to pay his staff a very healthy wage and still make a decent living. The shouts of 'we don't have the skills here' just don't wash, this is blatant abuse of the system to bring in cheap labour and push down the industry wages.
Companies just need to look at keeping their staff skill sets up to date, investment and promotion from with the ranks, rather than always going for the cheap option, quality does count in the long term, and home grown quality even more so, as surely it does not make sense to have highly skilled, highly qualified IT professionals forming long queues outside our unemployment benefit offices, so that immoral companies can import yet another person from abroad just to save a few pounds in the short term.
Look at what this attitude has done for the NHS, nurses wages pushed down so low that very few home grown workers will apply for these positions, even though they have the passion to care for us, resulting in the majority of NHS workers being imported from abroad and being exploited on these low wages, not being able to live near their work places, and perhaps having to work 2 or 3 jobs, all of this resulting in a drain on the 3rd worlds medical recourses, which is now a pressing issue for these countries.
Wait till this attitude starts spreading to government jobs or the legal or financial professions, perhaps only then we will see the backlash against these immoral practices.
5. Drew Edgar
So it's going to benefit overseas countries by our stealing their "best & brightest" ... I think not!
Nor will it benefit English society & working men in general.
It will benefit Mike Lynch & others with their snouts in the trough as they seek to exploit aliens by stealing them into England.
6. Nick Cole
And open the flood gates to many undesirable people as well as the few desirable!
Politically correct minority supporting activities are too often allowed to dictate to the majority. Defending individual rights against the interests of the majority is a recipe for dissent.
By all means bring people in, but be very careful about what we are doing.
The real drive for this is to provide cheap labour and no other purpose. If there is a lack of trained and skilled workers, why does the industry not provide training? Someone has to, the immigrants had to be trained and gain experience in the first place. If we don't do that for people already in the country where does this end? There are sufficient workers in the UK already, but if they don't have the appropriate skills whose fault is it? Experience is gained by doing the job. New starters don't have experience but after a while they do and applies in all walks of life.
This issue is really the old thorny one of generalists in charge being reluctant to concede that those who get their hands dirty 'in trade' have skills but have to be kept in their place, preferably on low wages.