Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The wastage of business immigrants is particularly marked, with 30 percent
not surviving in the data base beyond the first year. During 1990-94, the period
when Hong Kong was the leading country of immigration to Canada, there
were much higher rates of loss than in a comparative period a decade earlier.
Departure data from Hong Kong are so distinctive in the IMDB that it is iden-
tified as a 'special case' (Aydemir and Robinson 2006: 14).
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Forty percent of
working age male arrivals from Hong Kong did not remain in the data base for
more than a year, evidence of an extraordinary wastage rate. It is not known to
what extent their absence indicates permanent departure or an astronaut
arrangement. Of course departure from Canadian data systems need not mean
that immigrants have returned home. Another option is onward migration to a
third country and with Canada's historic brain drain to the United States it is
possible that immigrants will also follow the well-trodden trail southwards.
However, unlike immigrants from the Mainland where considerable seepage of
well-educated households occurs to the United States, the tendency for Hong
Kong migrants to Canada to follow this trend is limited (King and Newbold
2007; Ma 2009). Their preferred trajectory is back to East Asia.
While attempts have been made to quantify return migration in Hong
Kong, all have foundered as they either represent partial counts or else suffer
from respondent under-enumeration, or both. In the former case, the 2001
Hong Kong Census included a question on return migration, but only cap-
tured those who were locally born, living in Hong Kong in 2001, but living
outside Hong Kong, Macau and China for some period between 1996 and
2001. It captured 86,000 returnees, 39 percent from Canada, the leading
source (DeVoretz et al. 2002). An earlier General Household Survey in 1999
sampled 22,300 households. It specified returnees in terms of those cur-
rently living in Hong Kong, born in Hong Kong, Macau or the Mainland,
who had spent at least two years anywhere abroad in the previous decade
(Government of Hong Kong 2000). This more liberal definition inflated the
estimate to 118,000 returnees, but the authors cautioned there were many
reasons to regard this as an under-estimate, not least, 'Owing to the rather
sensitive nature of the subject, some respondents may not be willing to pro-
vide the required information accurately' (2000: 48). Not for the first time,
official statistics were subject to the wilful distortion of those asked to submit
to them; the actions of skilled agents undermined the overseeing attempts of
the state to define, evaluate and claim them, statistically and politically.
There is general agreement among these studies of the profile of those
least likely to stay in Canada. The 1999 special survey on returnees did
reveal that an economic elite was re-establishing residence (Government of
Hong Kong 2000). Returnees were three times more likely than the general
population to be in the top income bracket, and almost three-quarters had
jobs as professionals, managers and administrators. There was an impressive
level of human capital, with over half the adults completing a university
