a different point of view
I wonder what would happen if the Government department that stamps passports was asked to decide what sort of newcomers would make the best contribution to Hong Kong’s long-term development. An absurd idea! In real life, such decisions are made by informed policymakers. They look around at the history of immigrant-driven communities like the USA, Canada, Australia and, indeed, the Big Lychee itself. They conclude that what you need are young, energetic, adventurous, bright, entrepreneurial and creative huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Up to 1980, any hungry Mainlander with the audacity and wits to sneak across the heavily patrolled border and make it south of Boundary Street got an ID card – the rest were kicked back to China. Thus the Big Lychee secured the crème de la crème of semi-skilled labour to power its rise as an industrial centre. Today, the knowledge-based economy needs a different sort of work force, which is why most developed countries have some sort of points-based system to attract quotas of people likely to create wealth, jobs and tax revenues.
Hong Kong’s first post-1997 attempt at this missed the point entirely. Dubbed the Capital Investment Entrant Scheme, the deal was –
buy a luxury apartment and we’ll give you residency. It reflected Tung Chee-hwa’s deranged beliefs that Hong Kong was short of money and high property or asset prices were the cause of economic strength. The typical migrant was probably an octogenarian Indonesian Chinese looking for somewhere to park ill-gotten loot.
This is the Tung Scheme Mark 2. Instead of the already-rich, we are targeting the already-successful. But what Hong Kong needs is tomorrow’s winners. Line them up at the airport for a literacy test, check their teeth and let them in. Young people who are smart and ambitious rather than over-educated. Ready to take risks. A little bit desperate, perhaps. People who are single, in their 20s, not encumbered with family. People from dumps – Filipinos, Indians, Mainlanders – who want to get somewhere. People who can run rings around our home-grown dullards in spiky ginger hair who listen to Cantopop, stare at Hello Kitty mobile phones, read comic books and end up as real estate agents. But of course we can’t have that. It might upset them and our labour activists. Hong Kong – once a magnet for the tired, the poor, the homeless, the tempest-tost – is now the land of ‘various sectors’ petrified of having to compete with the world.
from Hemlock 
