LONDON: The UK Home secretary, David Blunkett, plans to impose a Pounds Sterling 500 surcharge on each of the 900,000 migrants who enter Britain each year to work, study or join family members.

The surcharge is expected to raise Pounds Sterling 450 million a year, a quarter of the Pounds Sterling 1.8 billion annual cost of Britain’s immigration and asylum system.

Home Office officials claim it is justified to impose a surcharge on migrants because they will make a “windfall gain through being granted access to the UK labour market”.

The Pounds Sterling 500 is on top of the Pounds Sterling 155 for work and study permits now being phased in. The surcharge is in the smallprint of Mr Blunkett’s immigration and asylum bill, which gets its second reading in the House of Commons next week.

The Home Office admits that the main motive is “an ongoing need to raise revenue”. The pressure on ministers to make their policies self-financing will be underlined when the finance minister confirms the tight nature of the public finances on Wednesday.

The disclosure of the charges is expected to provoke protests by members of parliament and by businesses which rely on migrant workers. The increases will be phased in to dilute their impact.

“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 onto migrants through a further one-off charge upon application,” says a Home Office background document.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.