Up to 100,000 Chinese young people were expected to be allowed to migrate to Hong Kong in the next five years under relaxed immigration rules, a news report said Friday. A new policy came into effect Friday allowing people born in mainland China but with one Hong Kong parent to be given residency in the wealthy former British colony.
The policy arises out of a 2001 court decision that the children born before 2001 in China but with a Hong Kong father or mother were entitled to right of abode in the city of 7 million.
An unnamed government source quoted by the South China Morning Post said 169,000 people, mostly now young adults, were eligible under the policy but only about 100,000 were expected to migrate. "We expect some 60 to 70 people will come every day, and this means all will arrive in town in four to five years," the source told the newspaper. Many of the eligible people are the products of cross-border marriages in the 1980s and 1990s when many older Hong Kong men married younger women from relatively poor southern China. The women were often only allowed into Hong Kong for brief visits and gave birth in China, triggering a long-running legal fight to win the children Hong Kong residency.
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