Welcome to Hong Kong

Mainland Chinese migrants are caught in limbo without healthcare or housing as they wait years for Hong Kong residency.



Some 50,000 mainland Chinese people obtain one-way permits to move to Hong Kong each year.

They then have to wait a further seven years before gaining residency and, in the meantime, have no status whatsoever and no access to healthcare, education, or public housing.

They suffer routine discrimination, even from other migrants who have already gained residency, and live in pitiable and squalid conditions - for example, a family of five can often live within a space of 100 square feet.

For some, this raises problems of mental as well as physical illness, and their only help comes from the New Women Arrivals League, which lobbies on their behalf and supports them however they can.

Most worrying to me is how this rocky integration after the handover has evolved into a racism that is now in constant circulation. In songs and on viral videos online, mainlanders are called "locust aliens" and their children "spawn". They are accused of having no manners, spitting and defecating on the street. One particularly discriminatory song, The Locust Song , was so popular, it inspired flash mobs of people to pop up and sing it at mainland tourists while they shopped downtown.

So it is in this context that I met some members of the New Arrivals Women’s League. The group is headed by the indomitable Yeung Mei, who is passionate about protecting these vulnerable mainland women and the freedom to voice their concerns. Yeung Mei explained how her family had been persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, which left her afraid to speak out. At the end of the film she says, "Hong Kong is like an expansive sky". It is, of course, another reason we must welcome our new arrivals.