Hong Kong government trying to woo back children of permanent residents

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It could change the face of Vancouver. The government of Hong Kong is trying to attract children of its permanent residents back by allowing them to apply for one-year visas to look for work.

UBC Geography Professor Dan Hiebert thinks the plan may work “very modestly.” He doesn’t see tens of thousands of people moving from Canada to Hong Kong.

“If the answer of success is hundreds moving, that might be true. But of course, that’s not going to have a very big impact either on the Canadian side of it or the Hong Kong side of it,” says Hiebert.

He tells us there is already lots of fluidity between Hong Kong and Vancouver and he doesn’t see this plan increasing it that much.

“Lots of countries have tried this. A couple of really easy-to-think-about examples: one would be Japan and another would be Italy,” he explains.

“In both cases, very similar circumstances to Hong Kong in the sense of rapidly declining fertility rates, worries about aging population, and a sense that return migration would be the easiest way to kind of fix those issues. In all cases, we’re dealing with countries that have been somewhat reluctant to bring in migration in say, the way Canada does, which is a globally-based invitation process to just anybody who has certain skills, et cetera. They’ve wanted to play a much stronger, kind of, management role on that, and are more comfortable with getting people who have pre-existing cultural connections to the country.”
Hiebert says it’s only been moderately successful in other places.

He points out Canada saw tens of thousands of people come from Hong Kong between the mid-1980s and late 1990s.

“And then once the repatriation actually happened in 1997, it became clear that China was not going to immediately change the economic nature of Hong Kong, and people felt that there was worry over a Communist government taking over property, making business impossible, et cetera, et cetera. Those things did not happen, and so in the post-’97 period, we saw a return. Again, the numbers aren’t really clear, but let’s say a few tens of thousands of people — maybe even more than a hundred thousand people — from Canada to Hong Kong. And of that, a lot of them had come to Vancouver. So, that was a pretty big component of that particular return migration.”

He adds in the last decade or so, we’ve seen more of an equilibrium between Vancouver and Hong Kong, saying the two places have similar levels of well-being, and there is a lot of travel across the Pacific.