Speaking at the conference “MOVING TO SCOTLAND TO WORK, FRESH TALENT – MYTH OR REALITY? Developing an Integrated Migration Framework for Scotland” at the COSLA Conference Centre, Edinburgh on Monday 6 February Keith Best, Chief Executive of IAS praised the Scottish Fresh Talent Initiative designed to bring in much needed workers for Scotland’s declining population

“The population growth predicted for Scotland over the next few years will be from immigration” he said. “Since the mid-1990s the numbers of births in Scotland have been so low that the number of deaths exceeds the number of births, and so the population is experiencing natural decline. Even though the number of births rose to 52,432 in 2003 this was not sufficient to halt the natural decline.

“Thanks to the Fresh Talent Initiative which was launched by the First Minister there have been over 8,000 enquiries to the Relocation Advisory Service from 12 October 2004 to the present day. The top five nationalities are India, Poland, USA, Nigeria and China.

“There is a welcome positive attitude towards economic migration from Government and civil servants in Scotland unlike from the Home Office – such as using “economic migrant” as a term of abuse which is so often the case south of the border. The Home Secretary should learn from this.