Refugees and asylum-seekers in Hong Kong struggle to survive under the government’s current refugee policy.
Reporters: Lotus Lau , John Yip
For many people in Hong Kong, the word “refugee” conjures up images of violent riots at detention camps and people being carried kicking and screaming onto airplanes to be repatriated to their home country.
Starting in the mid 1970s and throughout the 1980s until the early 1990s, boat loads of Vietnamese refugees and asylum seekers arrived in Hong Kong. They were fleeing persecution and seeking a better life in the countries of the West.
“Bắt đầu từ nay”, meaning “beginning from now” became the only Vietnamese phrase most people in Hong Kong knew. It was the opening phrase from a broadcast on public radio here, warning asylum seekers and migrants that they would be repatriated to Vietnam.
By 2000, most of the 200,000 Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong had either been granted asylum in western countries or repatriated and around 1,400 refugees and migrants were allowed to settle in the territory.
Society at large considered Hong Kong’s refugee “problem” to be over and the issue of refugees faded from public consciousness.
Yet, Hong Kong continues to be a refuge for people fleeing persecution. According to the United Nations High Commission Refugees (UNHCR) there are currently more than 700 refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong.
The UNHCR defines a refugee as a person with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion,” who is unable to return to their country because of that fear.
Adam, a refugee who refused to disclose his real name, left his family and travelled across half the world from East Africa to Hong Kong seven years ago. He had been persecuted in his home country for alleged political subversion and was eager to seek peace and safety here.
Adam was lucky in being granted refugee status just five days after his arrival. Some other asylum seekers may have to wait for two to three years on average. At first, he felt very grateful just for the safety he enjoyed here. As time went by, he began to want more out of life but Hong Kong could only provide the minimal for survival.
Refugees in Hong Kong are taken care of by the United Nations (UN). The UN provides financial aid through the Hong Kong branch of the International Social Service Hong Kong Branch (ISS-HK). To ensure refugees’ basic shelter and food needs are met, they are given HK$1,500 for rent, which is paid directly to their landlords, and another HK$1,200 for food, transport and other daily necessities.
Although the UN pays for their rent, the refugees have to look for accommodation and settle all the relevant arrangements with their landlords themselves. Alex, a Somali refugee, found it hard to find a place to live in Hong Kong on such a tight budget.
“Including water and electricity fees, the room where I live in now at Sham Shui Po costs me around HK$2,000 HKD every month.” says Alex. As the rent exceeds the amount of money subsidised by the UN, a church helped him make up the shortfall.
David, who prefers to remain anonymous, came to Hong Kong with his wife, who was five month pregnant at the time, four years ago. He has had similar experiences to Alex. “At first, my wife and I only got HK$2,000 from the ISS and our first apartment in Jordan was 6 sq m. in size [64 sq ft]. A very tiny room cost us HK$2,800.” David says the extra $800 HKD also came from a friend from church.
Adam points out that it is hard for refugees to just get by. “There is a gap between what is provided and what we actually need,” he says. “They give us rice, but they don’t give us a rice cooker; they give us meat, but there is no fridge to store it; they give us accommodation, but there is not a proper bed for us to sleep on.”
A refugee’s journey is never easy. In order to leave as soon as possible, they usually have to pay a substantial amount of money to local agents or smugglers for their services. In poverty-stricken Somalia, this fee can be as high as US$4,000 per person.
David says he paid HK$50,000 to a travel agency in order to escape with his wife. He thought they were heading to Australia. “I got off the airplane only to realize I was here in Hong Kong. All I knew about Hong Kong at that time was Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee.” David was 22 years old when he first arrived in Hong Kong and had never left Somalia before.
He is not alone. Many asylum seekers had no idea they would end up in Hong Kong. But in fact, if an asylum seeker goes to a country that requires them to have a visa, like the US and Canada, they might never be allowed into the country. They may be turned back at the airport, or else immediately placed in detention. As Hong Kong is a visa-free destination for many countries, it appears to be increasingly a midway point for refugees.
“If you are a political refugee, of course you don’t have the luxury of applying for a visa and letting the government know where you are going. So you have to go straight to some countries where visa is not required,” says Jonnet Bernal, assistant manager of Christian Action, a Hong Kong charity that launched its Refugee Programme in 2004.
But not everyone who comes to seek asylum can become a refugee. They must enter first as an asylum-seeker. Then they must go through the refugee status determination (RSD), a strict screening process held by the UNHCR, in order to ascertain refugee status. They are not recognized as a refugee until they successfully pass all the interviews and assessments to verify their data.
Most of the refugees come from war-torn countries in South Asia and Africa, extremely traumatized by their experiences. So they are desperately in need of help.
Christian Action relies on donations for their work. As much as Bernal wants to help all the refugees and asylum-seekers, she admits they are restricted by the lack of resources.
“We don’t have problems getting clients,” says Bernal, “we have problems helping them with very, very limited resources.”
In most countries, the government usually oversees the processing of refugees and their welfare. But in Hong Kong the UNHCR is in charge of the majority of work, from RSD to providing assistance.
“As the Hong Kong government has not ratified the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, we have to do RSD ourselves.” says Lum Kwok-choi, the spokesman from the Hong Kong Sub-Office of the UNHCR.
The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees sets out the rights of individuals who are granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum.
Mabel Au Mei-bo, director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, says that as Hong Kong has not signed the convention, the government has an excuse for not taking better care of refugees and asylum seekers.
What makes matters worse is that refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong are not allowed to work and adult refugees and asylum seekers are not allowed to study. The government enacted a policy in 2009 stating that refugees and asylum seekers who work would be fined, as would their employers.
The inability to work has proved to be the hardest part for many refugees in Hong Kong. “What we need the most is not money, we want to work or go to school,” says Adam, “We want to do something in life.
Gordon Mathews, professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has done research on refugees living in Chungking Mansions, also thinks this is aggravating their hardship.
“They are legally not allowed to work and they could be here for six to seven years. They are in their 20s to 30s, they are in the peak of years of their life, but they are not able to do anything at all.” he says.
Still, Mathews acknowledges that this issue is a dilemma as the number of asylum seekers coming to Hong Kong would increase if they were allowed to work.
Mathews currently holds a class for refugees and asylum seekers every Saturday in Chungking Mansions. They gather and discuss current affairs and social issues – from world politics to transgender people.
David is one of Mathews’ students. He first came to the class with the intention of learning English. But the heated discussion aroused his interest in current affairs and politics. “I want to write something and send it to the newspaper,” he says.
However, David finds it extremely difficult to get to know more about Hong Kong. He thinks educating refugees about Hong Kong would be helpful and would help them more easily adapt to the unfamiliar environment.
Adam and David have both had unpleasant experiences during their limited social interaction with local people. Adam says a woman once covered her nose when she saw him. People sometimes get up and find another seat when he sits next to them. David was once treated as if he was a robber when all he wanted to do was offer to help a woman who was carrying something heavy.
“This just shows how little the locals know about this group of people who coexist with them,” he says.
The refugee issue in Hong Kong has evolved from being a highly visible “problem” into something that is invisible and forgotten.
Some in Hong Kong thought it was unfair for Britain to make its colony a Port of First Asylum for the Vietnamese boat people, while the West dragged their feet over resettling the refugees in their countries. The UNHCR still owes Hong Kong $1.61 billion for costs related to the Vietnamese refugees and migrants.
But like today’s refugees and asylum seekers, most of the Vietnamese never wanted to set down roots in Hong Kong. They were seeking lives elsewhere. As Peter Barnes, a lawyer who helped the Vietnamese safeguard their rights at the time, points out, they were willing to put up with detention in prison-like conditions rather than go back to Vietnam.
Barnes believes the Hong Kong government’s current policy on refugees has been influenced negatively by the territory’s experience of the Vietnamese refugee issue—and that that negativity is probably shared by many members of the public.
He says many people see refugees as non-genuine queue-jumpers who want to cheat the system but, “ in most cases that is an unfair assessment. The lack of knowledge of how and why asylum seekers seek protection in another state, as well as the propaganda flowing from official pronouncements, leads regrettably to ignorance and judgments based on prejudice and bias.”
Hong Kong is a city where many people are themselves refugees from the Mainland, or the descendants of such refugees yet, as Barnes says, “People have short memories.”
