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Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

bbc.co.uk

281–290 of 409 posts

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#281
post #186
post #67

68% of conservative voters, 71% of labour voters, and 77% of libdem voters support this. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/0...

Whether UK citizens approve this or not, logistical challenge of making this happen is immense. I think UK politicians know this is just a threat. Moving people & jobs physically to UK, when people have physical investment in a house, school, bank accounts, investments is not easy. I can see people moving if CCP is literally killing non-protesting citizens like holocaust. On top of it, what is to prevent CCP from blo…

One of the major phenomena of Hong Kong in the 1980s and early 1990s was families getting out if they could afford it, because everyone was nervous about the Chinese handover. This wave of emigration even plays a role in contemporary Hong Kong film of the era like Chungking Express. And even before the fears of the handover, many educated HKers were emigrating to the US for the sake of higher wages.

Yes, HKers have ties to HK that are a hassle to break, but plenty of people have broken them and up and left.

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#282
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole reason for getting Canadian citizenship is for the day that China engulfs HK and they want to leave. China isn't going to restrict the movement of hundreds of thousands of foreigners legally living in HK. 300,000 Canadians living in HK right now.

> China isn't going to restrict the movement of hundreds of thousands of foreigners legally living in HK. At least, they are less likely to do so than they are people who aren’t foreigners, although even them I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it. China ending the two-systems arrangement in Hong Kong despite the Joint Declaration is basically saying “As far as HK (and, implicitly, anything we consider Chinese territor…

Now you know how Iran feels :)

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason some portion of the left is pretty intolerant of the current situation - it literally results in violence to people who don't even share their opinions in the first place.

The "current situation" is not as clear-cut as many would make it out to be. Watching an emotional video is not the smoking gun that shows one side to be completely right, but that's what's happening now. I would think a good write up/analysis using high quality statistics would be the way to decide what is happening in the "current situation". But a graphic and emotional video is going to pull the strings much harde…

A lot of people have been trying "good write-ups" and "high quality statistics" for a long time, it turns out they don't actually change people's minds - people make up their mind before reading the article. The production of "high quality statistics" hasn't been the turning point in any civil rights movement I'm aware of.

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you emigrated to another country because people were immigrating to your country and immigration is bad? Is this sarcasm?

Seems to me that they immigrated to another country because of a specific type of cultural phenomenon that was happening in their country of origin resulting from immigration. Maybe the same type of phenomenon is not happening in their country of choice? Doesn't seem sarcastic at all.

Sure. The thread is about how immigration is beneficial to countries in long term.

It was the OP who came up with the example of France to say that is not true.

> It’s the reverse, the burden is definitive and ever growing.

So there are two possibilities

* The French example is one of the very few exceptions -> This means the point OP is trying to make is kind of useless. Exceptions are present in almost all the theories.

* French example is what will happen in all most all the countries -> In that case OP's point becomes just ironic.

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#285
post #87
post #67

68% of conservative voters, 71% of labour voters, and 77% of libdem voters support this. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/0...

Surprising isn't it, given how much of a driving force EU immigration was in the Brexit debate.

Hong Kong is a part of the Empire that was severed recently, and not because the people there actively sought that outcome. I suspect that for some of the people concerned about immigration, that makes Hong Kongers more British-separated-by-ill-conceived-policy than foreigners.

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#286
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kind of depends, immigration wasn't a big part of it from talking with many business partners. Many just dont like the idea rules are being made in Brussels.

The claim that Turkey was soon going to join the EU (which isn't going to happen) and flood the country with Turkish immigrants was a major component of vote leave messaging: "Turkey/NHS/£350 million". Edit: FYI Dominic Cummings actually blogged about the important of Turkey to their success: https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-...

Turkey has actually turned in a net labour importer not so long ago, and it has a robust industrial sector.

Rural Turkey has unemployment issue, but that's a separate matter to Turkish migrants to EU.

Turkish migration to EU is much more white collar, and urban.

P.S. The most hilarious rightist conspiracy theory I've heard of was that of Boris Johnson being a Turkish spy

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#287
post #198

I live in Vancouver. The pattern for many Hong Kong immigrants is to have the mother and children live in Canada while the father works in HK.The family doesn't declare the foreign income in Canada. So they enjoy the benefits of a low tax HK income. And they get all the nice things that go with living in high tax Canada while not contributing to it -free healthcare, subsided University, safe communities, clean enviro…

Then shouldn't the government be closing this loophole and taxing whatever vehicle they use to transfer wealth? I'd criticize an individual for evading taxes, but a "group" of people is just doing what people do. EDIT: If you want to talk about the "functional" value of immigrants, then you need to get to the root purpose and bring in whoever is having the most kids.

Legislation that has any kind of a racial (or perceived to be racial) aspect to it cannot really be discussed freely. Even though closing such loopholes may be perfectly legitimate, if exploitation of the loophole happens to correlate to a racially identifiable group, in the current age of social media based hyper propaganda it is a very dangerous political move for a career politician (or their party) to touch.

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hong Kong was a British colony for generations and is still strongly influenced by western culture. Probably why China has such an obsession with crushing it. Adopting HK citizens is a far easier sell than Syrians. They already speak English, are highly educated, wealthy, westernized, and have special status in UK law. Letting a ton of refugees in is a large burden on the host country. They don't share British cultur…

> Adopting HK citizens is a far easier sell than Syrians. They already speak English No they don't. According to the Hong Kong government's 2011 census only 41% of residents spoke English moderately well (not even fluently, just moderately well). 20% reported not being able to speak any English whatsoever; not even a few sentences. Only 57% of residents of Hong Kong considered themselves "bilingual". Only 30% of stud…

> 41% of residents spoke English moderately well

Do you know (or care to speculate) on how those eligible for this offer would compare to residents captured by the census?

e.g. Did lots of people arrive from the mainland post-97, who might drive down the average? Or perhaps those with overseas-british papers are older, and the younger generation speaks much more English? I don't know enough to guess.

Re: Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

#289
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - because these are RICH Asian migrants, not POOR North African and Syrian migrants. It's a combination of differential racism and elitism.

> "differential racism" So basically the existing word "racism" didn't fit (because racist Brits would hate Asian HKers just as much as brown Syrians and black Africans) so you invented a new completely concept but conveniently attached the word "racism" to it for maximal emotional impact? Despicable.

Racism works fine for what is described, there is nothing about racism which requires it to be “my race good, all other races equally bad”. “Differential racism” is a perfectly good way of distinguishing a multitiered racial heirarchy from a binary one.

Though I think nationalism may be at least as much of a factor as race-based differentiation. (That is, that nationalism in the context of colonial history is why HKers are treated more favorably by opinion than other non-white, or even white, immigrants.)

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