Abstract
This paper discusses the global crisis of asylum, with developing-world peoples clamoring to be admitted to stable and wealthy developed-world societies, and illustrates this crisis through the case of Hong Kong, where I have been teaching asylum seekers for the past 6 years. Hong Kong’s asylum-seeker population is relatively small: there are 8,000–10,000 from South Asia and Africa who have come to Hong Kong to have their cases decided by the UNHCR or by the Hong Kong government, a process that may take 6 or more years. Many asylum seekers have come to Hong Kong not to escape political persecution, but to try to make a better living than they could in their home countries. Asylum seekers are legally forbidden to work in Hong Kong, but most work anyway, because under Hong Kong law, they are difficult to apprehend and prosecute. The ironic situation this creates is that those asylum seekers who illegally work are physically and psychologically better off than those who do not work, obeying the law. The former, once their cases are rejected, as almost all cases are rejected in Hong Kong, will go home with a nest egg, while the latter, who are more likely to be genuine in their claims, gain nothing and only interminably wait, while living with the fear of being returned home to face possible imprisonment or death.
Hong Kong’s particular dysfunction can be largely solved through a limited non-renewable voluntary working-visa scheme for asylum seekers: most economic asylum seekers would prefer to be working legally, I have found, and would leave the asylum-seeker pool if such a scheme were available, enabling political asylum seekers to then be handled more comprehensively and conscientiously as to their cases. However, the Hong Kong situation also illustrates the larger global problem of asylum seekers faced by developed-world societies. Why are asylum seekers escaping political, ethnic, or religious persecution deemed genuine, while those seeking to escape poverty are deemed fraudulent? Ultimately, I argue, this distinction in Hong Kong and elsewhere is no more than a means by which developed-world societies can justify shutting out all but a very few developing-world people, all the while preserving a source of cheap illegal labor.
Much of this paper is taken from my forthcoming book. Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (University of Chicago Press, 2011). The research for this paper has been funded by an Hong Kong RGC Earmarked Research Grant, “Chungking Mansions as a ‘Global Building,’” ID 2110148.
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Notes
- 1.
One asylum seeker who read this chapter has advised against the use of these terms, since the line is so unclear: “You’re saying that some people are entirely genuine and other people are entirely not, but that’s not the way it is.” His point is valid; however, because these terms are so often used, I retain them, albeit in quotation marks.
- 2.
This is apparently true not just in Hong Kong. Barbara Harrell-Bond writes that, “As one United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) management consultant acknowledged, ‘We work for no other organization in the political, governmental, or commercial world which has such an absence of mechanisms for determining citizen or consumer satisfaction’” (2002, p. 53). The UNHCR, by the accounts of some of my more knowledgeable informants, has a better reputation outside Hong Kong than within Hong Kong.
- 3.
These contradictions are the case far beyond Hong Kong. Among other evocative discussions, see Englund (2006) for a glimpse into how human rights activism paradoxically furthers the oppression of the poor in Malawi; see Verdirame and Harrell-Bond (2005) on how human rights organizations and refugee relief policies throughout the developing world effectively deny refugees their human rights.
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Mathews, G. (2014). Asylum Seekers in Hong Kong: The Paradoxes of Lives Lived on Hold. In: Zhang, J., Duncan, H. (eds) Migration in China and Asia. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8759-8_5
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