How to net the necessary talent (28 March 2006)

Hong Kong is a city of migrants. Its prosperity was built on the daring, initiative and sheer hard work of the men and women who came here from the mainland and transformed a barren rock into a thriving international centre of commerce.

Today, thanks in large part to the labour and ingenuity of those migrants, our city remains one of the world's business capitals. However, it also faces a number of strategic challenges if it is to maintain its status.

One is our low birth rate. We have an ageing population and a shortage of young people coming through our school and university systems, to follow the generation that wrote the recent chapters of the Hong Kong success story. As a result, we face a mismatch of manpower. According to government estimates, this means that by next year there will be 100,000 vacancies for high-skilled labour that we will not be able to fill. At the same time, the oversupply of low-skilled labour will reach 230,000 workers.

It is for this reason that we in the Liberal Party warmly welcome an announcement in Financial Secretary Henry Tang Ying-yen's budget speech last month: a Quality Migrant Admission Scheme, to attract increasing numbers of talented mainlanders and overseas people to settle here.

The scheme is a positive step forward. What concerns us, however, is that it does not go far enough, and will not do enough to help bridge a skills gap that could become a severe hindrance to Hong Kong's pace of economic development.

Under the scheme, a quota of 1,000 new migrants - who meet a rigid set of criteria and pass a two-phase selection process - will be allowed to settle in Hong Kong, in an attempt to raise the quality and quantity of our existing workforce.

We can understand the government's reluctance to take steps that might be perceived as opening the floodgates to new migrants. Hong Kong has been tossed on the seas of economic turmoil in recent years, and workers are justifiably nervous about job security.

But an excess of caution is the enemy of opportunity, and it does not take a skilled mathematician to realise that 1,000 new migrants a year will make only a trifling impact on a skills gap that will be 100 times greater than that level within 12 months.

At the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference meetings in Beijing this month, I submitted - together with my colleagues Selina Chow Liang Shuk-yee and Lau Wong-fat - a proposal to the central government to step up the exchange of talent between the mainland and Hong Kong.

We would like to see more of the mainland's brightest youngsters move to Hong Kong while they are still students. The procedures should be simplified to let them come here to study, building closer links between Hong Kong and mainland tertiary institutions. Currently, only about 5,000 students from mainland China are in Hong Kong's tertiary institutions, and only some 6 per cent of mainland students who study overseas choose Hong Kong. This is a surprisingly and disappointingly low figure.

By forging ties at the university level, we can bring to our city a new wave of progressive and ambitious young mainland migrants, who could give us the benefit of their abilities.

Also, we must set out to attract not just talented people from the mainland, but from around the world. We applaud the reversal of the 2003 ban on spouses of newly arrived expatriates working here. But, as well as removing disincentives to working in Hong Kong, we must find more ways of successfully recruiting people to this city.

If Hong Kong is to succeed, we need to open our doors and let in the most talented people, whether they are from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe or the United States. Migration is not a word for Hong Kong to fear.