JITTERY HK FOLK SEEK SAFE HAVEN ABROAD
A surge in migration applications suggests more wants to leave
AS protests in Hong Kong stretch from summer into autumn with little sign of resolution, a surge in migration applications suggests more locals are making plans to leave the city.
Their sentiments, reflected in passport paperwork and in interviews with residents, migration agents and real estate brokers across the globe, showed the potential
for human and capital flight out of the city.
Since an abortive push to allow extradition to mainland China sparked unrest in the city three months ago, emigration seminars have been overflowing, organisers and attendees said.
Requests for police-record printouts, which cost HK$225 (RM120) and are only issued for visa applications or child adoptions, jumped 54 per cent to 3,649 last month, compared with last year. There were more requests in this year than at the same point in any of the previous five years.
In 2017, the most recent year for which figures are available, there were 75 adoptions in the city, a number comparable to previous years. The city’s government estimated that last year about 7,600 people left the city for good, roughly one-third the number who sought police-record printouts.
Authorities in Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan reported spikes in migration enquiries, and property agents from Melbourne to Vancouver said their phones were running hot.
“There are many uncertainties in Hong Kong,” one investor on a property agent’s late-August tour of suburban Melbourne said.
“People like me in their 40s and 50s — we think about our child,” said the investor, who gave only her family name, Lee, because her employer forbids her speaking to the media.
“We want a back-up home, a better place to live,” she added. “At least if something bad happens, they have a back-up plan, an exit plan.”
And she is not alone: Lee’s sentiments were echoed in interviews with 10 other families or individuals considering emigrating.
China has denounced the protests, accusing the United States and Britain of fomenting unrest, and the city’s government has sought to head off further trouble by accepting one of the protesters’ demands and withdrawing the extradition bill.
A mass march scheduled for tomorrow will test how far that has allayed public anger.
As Hong Kong’s protests have expanded during the summer, swelling to million-strong marches and calls for democracy, so too have Hong Kongers’ searches for safe havens.
In June, lawyers and bankers said that wealthy tycoons were shifting their fortunes to places like Singapore.
Now, migration agents said middle-class families were checking out cheaper alternatives.
“The numbers are the highest in recent years, even higher than 2014,” said Peggy Lau, a sales director at Uni Immigration Consultancy here, where enquiries have surged sevenfold since protests began in June.