Ivan still remembers the time his son’s teacher called their home. The nine-year-old was in trouble, Ivan was told, because he’d smirked during the flag-raising ceremony at school. When he asked his son, the boy explained that the Chinese flag had got caught halfway up the pole, and all the kids were giggling. Normal kid things. But after the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, the city received new instructions to educate its young “patriotically”. Such behaviour was now deemed disrespectful to China, the motherland, and worthy of a stern call home.
This was just one of the many incidents that told Ivan and his wife that the political environment in their home city was tightening. In 2022, they moved to the UK with their two boys. They were some of the 160,000 Hongkongers who have come to the UK since the protests ended with the introduction of the fearsome National Security Law.
At the time, Britain, as the city’s erstwhile coloniser, could do little but offer some Hongkongers a route out. It set up a visa for those with British National (Overseas) status. “Britain could not in good conscience shrug our shoulders and walk away,” the prime minister Boris Johnson had said when announcing the scheme.
Ivan’s story is typical: over half of the new arrivals were parents with young families who wanted a better, freer education for their kids. Some were active in protests themselves, and feared for their safety. And still others came for economic reasons, taking advantage of the new route to make better lives here. Britain welcomed them all.
That feels like a different age compared with the rhetoric of British politicians today, each trying to outflank the next on immigration. Keir Starmer railed against an “island of strangers” and pledged to make it harder for people to get indefinite leave to remain (ILR), doubling the settlement period from five to ten years. Would this apply to Hongkongers too? The government had no answer, and has still not answered. Then Nigel Farage went even further, pledging to scrap ILR altogether and explicitly ruling out an exemption for Ukrainians and Hongkongers. The future of families like Ivan’s is now in limbo.
Whatever your position on small boats, however you feel about multiculturalism in the UK and the so-called “Boriswave”, if Britain has no space for a group like the Hongkongers, then our national panic over immigration will surely have gone too far. This country needs some level of immigration, and if it is not the economically productive and highly educated exiles from Hong Kong, to whom we also have a moral duty, then who will we let in?
Using the word “duty” in this context risks sounding sanctimonious and earnest but it’s hard to know how else to describe the UK’s responsibility. Given the injustice of the way in which Britain originally took Hong Kong, as a spoil from the First Opium War, a rising China was always going to demand its return, as Deng Xiaoping did in 1982. But that return had conditions: China promised to govern the city under the spirit of “one country, two systems” for at least 50 years.
And yet, just 23 years after the handover, that autonomy was ended with the National Security Law. As the government rounded up journalists, activists and legislators with its newfound powers, the UK did little — perhaps could do little — except to criticise from afar, even as British citizens were among those imprisoned, like the tycoon Jimmy Lai. The least London could do was offer some Hongkongers safe haven.
It’s understandable to think that such moral duties are luxury beliefs, that it’s the kind of largesse that wealthier countries with fewer economic pressures can afford. But Hongkongers are no charity case.
Those who have arrived since 2021 are more educated than the British average (59 per cent have a university degree, compared with the UK average of 34 per cent) and almost all were professional workers of one sort or another back home. They tend to be financially independent and, in the UK, have generally settled in safe, leafy suburbs with competitive schools. This young and aspiring group are keen to integrate. Some have found support in churches and are now active volunteers, while a few have already been elected to local councils. If anything, their talents are underutilised as employers prefer native English speakers or don’t recognise the professional qualifications they had in Hong Kong. (Incidentally, these are issues that the Liberal Democrats, more than any party, have campaigned on. Their effort has made an impression on many Hongkongers.)
They could also bring with them a literal pot of gold — a £4 billion pot to be precise. That’s how much money is tied up in their state pensions back in Hong Kong, as estimated by the think tank the China Strategic Risks Institute. The new arrivals can’t access this money because the Hong Kong government doesn’t recognise their British visas. Only when they get indefinite leave to remain will the money be unfrozen. Under current rules, that could be as soon as next year for those who arrived in 2021. But not if Starmer extends the settlement requirement to ten years.
There are many reasons to think that Britain’s immigration system is not working: we are not integrating enough, we are humiliatingly powerless when it comes to small boats and deportations, we are still too embarrassed to discuss issues of race and culture. But we must not let this moment of soul-searching tip over into madness. Britain still needs immigrants — and who exemplifies that better than the Hongkongers?