Hong Kong exodus has a colonial past

Hong Kong is no stranger to goodbyes. In the lead-up to the 1997 handover to China, thousands left, often for Canada and Australia. Now, hundreds of thousands more may be contemplating a new British immigration program aimed at providing solace to a former colony increasingly in Beijing’s grip. It’s a long-delayed wave of departures from a defunct empire, with all the potential haste, finality and loss that implies.
The vast range of projected outcomes, whether in numbers of travellers, cost or fiscal benefit will worry both Hong Kongers considering an exit and those who would receive them in the UK. Migration is impossible to predict with precision: Not everyone who applies for the program will leave. For policy makers, though, learning from the past is a start — not least for a British government aiming to right historic wrongs. From the 1940s to the 1970s, millions fled once-bountiful colonies and repatriated to Europe. Though they’ve settled or at least largely melted from public view, grave mistakes were made with their reception.
Governments underestimated the numbers that would actually turn up, many with next to nothing. They misjudged the impact on a frequently resentful population and on housing stock. No one even considered the deep alienation that would engulf people who arrived and suddenly felt they belonged nowhere. At least the economies then were growing, or hopeful.
There were still more broken promises for the non-White arrivals from distant possessions who came alongside former colonists, like the Caribbean migrants sailing aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 and on subsequent ships. The so-called Windrush generation had often been invited to work in postwar Britain, only to be met with overt racism. Decades later, many were caught in a tangle of tightened immigration policies and denied basic rights. Some who had arrived as children on their parents’ passports were threatened with expulsion. Despite official apologies, too few have been compensated.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s proposal and the path to citizenship offered to Hong Kongers born before 1997 atones for some of that. It’s good politics, given pressure for a tough response after China introduced a national security law last year that undermined agreements protecting the territory’s freedoms. It’s also a moral obligation for a colonial power that succumbed to xenophobic pressure in 1981 and cut off Hong Kong’s people. They were never offered self-determination as an alternative.
China’s objections to Johnson’s open door have been loud. Beijing says it will not recognise the British National (Overseas) passport as a valid travel document. That does not alter the right to leave, nor Britain’s freedom to welcome arrivals.
Remarkably little is known about what Johnson’s grand gesture will mean in practical terms. More than 5 million of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million residents are eligible, either directly or as dependents. Not all will go. But those who do could still, in short order, add anything from several thousand to a million or more new people to a British population of close to 70 million, grappling with a post-Brexit economy.
There are few exact precedents for a migration that lies somewhere between gradual economic movements from Europe and brutal forced departures, as from Uganda in 1972. Today, there is no deadline. There is urgency for many as Beijing toughens control and its stance on
dissent. The warning from history is clear: Don’t underestimate the impact.

—Bloomberg