Being anti-Brexit and no fan of Boris Johnson or recent Labour leaders, yours truly has become a bit of a Cassandra of late. But I’m still a professional optimist with a passion, reinforced by 30 years in politics and policymaking, to build rather than to block, and to constantly seek out new sources of inspiration. And I have just found a big one: the wave of immigration from Hong Kong, now in the tens of thousands and soon possibly in the hundreds of thousands, which could be a powerhouse of growth and liberal optimism for Britain hereafter.
First, the numbers. In May the Home Office reported 34,000 visa applications from Hong Kongers seeking residency in the UK over just two months. This compared with just 5,354 applications for visas of any type by EU citizens in the first three months of the year, including as short-term visitors. In the six months since then, Hong Konger visa applications have risen to around 90,000. A fair number of them are actually coming, as I know from new residents in my own neighbourhood in central London.
And not just to London. A friend in Warrington held a tea party on Sunday for a newly arrived Hong Kong family around the corner, who chose the town because property is much cheaper than in the capital and there is a sizeable pre-existing Chinese community in Manchester. Why did they come to the UK? “We don’t want our children and grandchildren stuck in a repressive dictatorship,” said the mid-40s father, who ran an events business in Hong Kong. He has just got a job in a Manchester call centre, but obviously isn’t planning on hanging around phone banks for long before he gets going entrepreneurially.
To put this in perspective, my immigrant community—the Cypriots—has made a pretty big contribution to the UK since my parents’ generation started coming in large numbers from the 1950s. The total number of arrivals was about 80,000 over half a century. This wave of Hong Kongers is more like the Kenyan and Ugandan Asians—70,000 in just six years after 1968—and the number could end up being several times higher over not much longer. The right to visas has been extended to all British National (Overseas) passport holders: these currently number about 300,000 of Hong Kong’s 7.5m residents, but hundreds of thousands more are potentially eligible by virtue of having been born in the former British colony before it passed to China in 1997. The better comparison might end up being with EU migration since 2004: an estimated 1.5m.
It’s not just the numbers. My Cypriot community mostly arrived with little or no money, and mostly without good English, just plenty of ambition. Ditto the central and eastern Europeans after 2004. The Kenyan and Ugandan Asians mostly arrived with a bit of money, goodish English, and a ton of ambition.
The Hong Kongers have the lot: money, English, ambition—even British patriotism from the get-go. My Warrington friend told me that a group of new arrivals were at the local war memorial on Remembrance Sunday singing “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” something my dad’s generation of Cypriots didn’t do because, well, they had been escaping not from the Chinese state but from the British army.
Let me give fulsome credit to the Johnson government, including Dominic Raab when he was foreign secretary, for doing the right and bold thing for the Hong Kongers. It is one of the bigger ironies of modern British politics that the party which took us out of the EU because of xenophobia is welcoming hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers after barely any public or parliamentary debate. There probably should have been more debate. We all know why there wasn’t: had the Conservative Party been consulted, the doors would have slammed shut.
We haven’t even yet begun to see the upside—which is not just the immigrants themselves and all their drive to succeed. One of the topics at the Warrington tea party was the difficulty of moving pensions. If this can be sorted, and pensions can be moved from funds in Hong Kong or China, then conservative estimates—a $50k pension pot per migrant with a longish employment record—suggest there is $4.5bn available to be moved to the UK and invested in funds and businesses here.
Wow. And I mean wow. We shouldn’t be talking about Singapore but Hong Kong-on-Thames.
