AND ANOTHER THING
Room for the Hong Kong Chinese if they pay for others to leave
PAUL JOHNSON
The right wing of the Conservative Party is wrong to oppose the request by the Gov- ernor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, that 3,300,000 of the colony's respectable citi- zens have rights of British residence attached to their British passports. What they should be doing is to reformulate it in a way which would be acceptable to the British people.
We have all kinds of moral, if not exactly legal responsibilities towards the Hong Kong Chinese. We created the place. We invited their forebears to live there. They have always been loyal, law-abiding, hard- working and submissive. They trusted us. We have only recently allowed them to vote about their future and they have opted over- whelmingly for British-style democracy.
Yet we propose, nevertheless, to hand them over, bound hand and foot, to a total- itarian regime which already has 20 million people in its gulag. If it is humanly possible, we ought to give these decent and trusting people the right to a British passport and the option of coming to live here. But can we do this without betraying our own peo- ple, whom we have promised will not be made to suffer another wave of mass emi- gration?
There is no difficulty in accommodating the Chinese economically. They have a strong family structure and a long and vig- orous tradition of entrepreneurship. They are among the world's most desirable immigrants. All over South-East Asia, Chi- nese colonies constitute valuable elements in the economic infrastructure. Over here, the Chinese have fitted in remarkably well. Unemployment is virtually unknown among them. Their enterprises flourish.
As Tony Blair has noted, the future of Britain lies essentially with small businesses and the self-employed, and he intends to make the Labour Party compete with the Conservatives for the allegiance of these two dynamic groups. The Hong Kong Chi- nese would fit into this future pattern per- fectly. They would do a great deal more than that. The emergence of Hong Kong as one of the world's most successful financial and commercial centres is due only in part to the British, who provided the original capital, expertise and legal structure. It is mainly the work of the Chinese themselves, millions of them. It is highly likely they could help to bring about the same miracle here, especially if — as looks increasingly possible — Britain rejects European feder- alism and chooses to go her own way as an autonomous trading and financial power, an offshore island, rather like Hong Kong itself, only on a much bigger scale.
There are, then, no economic obstacles to taking them in, if necessary all of them, though in practice the majority would choose to go elsewhere particularly Cana- da, or even stay in Hong Kong. But there is a numbers problem which raises insupera- ble political obstacles. We cannot tolerate a further net immigration of up to 3.3 mil- lion.
But need the emigration be net? Herein lies the solution. A large-scale Chinese immigration would be acceptable if it was balanced by a large-scale emigration of other recent immigrants who have failed to make it here. The black minority in Britain, whether first- or second-generation immi- grants, both legal and illegal, is now large, discontented, culturally unintegrated and, in part at least, unsuccessful. How big it is no one knows. There are supposed to be, for instance, only 80,000 Nigerians in Britain, but an official of the Nigerian High Commission here recently admitted that there were 400,000. The West Indian ele- ment is also much larger than government is prepared to admit. There is now, in addi- tion, a large, hidden influx from Central and East Africa.
We are kidding ourselves if we suppose that the black minority can ever be assimi- lated here. It has not happened even in the United States, where there is so much more space and so many more opportunities, and where so many other large minorities from all over the world have been and are being successfully absorbed. For an entire gener- ation, the Americans created an elaborate legal structure of Affirmative Action, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars oper- ating it, to give the blacks one last chance to fit in. It has clearly failed and is now being dismantled, and the black racial problem is once more the subject of fierce debate. There is no evidence at all that we can handle this problem any more success- fully than the Americans, and our resources are much less.
Moreover, and this is perhaps the key point, many of the blacks themselves recog- nise that there is no long-term future for them here. Blacks were drawn by the need for unskilled or semi-skilled labour, a need which is rapidly ceasing to exist. Because of a weak family structure, and a consequent failure to take advantage of educational opportunities, most male blacks fail to acquire usable skills and are unemployed for much of their lives. The result is abuse of the welfare system and crime. But I need not go on: we are all familiar with the prob- lem. What is new is that many blacks recog- nise its insoluble nature and would be will- ing, are indeed eager, to return to the Caribbean or Africa if we could make it worth their while to do so.
It is at this point that the Hong Kong Chinese come in. Both as individuals, and as a community, they could provide the resources to make large-scale repatriation of discontented members of the black minority possible. For every Hong Kong Chinese given a passport and admitted, funds would have to be provided to enable one emigrant to leave and his/her citizen- ship to be revoked. Thus the actual total numbers of Britain's minorities would remain the same, but their composition and quality would change radically and, from an economic point of view, for the better.
Before anyone reacts in feigned Political- ly Correct horror to this businesslike and practical proposal, I would like an honest effort made to find out the feelings towards it of ordinary members of the black minori- ty here. I believe they would be favourable. Indeed, my hunch is that many blacks would jump at the opportunity to escape from a hostile society which cannot accom- modate them to one where they could establish themselves economically and feel at home. Meanwhile, let us consider seri- ously the economic benefits that the loyal Hong Kong Chinese could bring to us.
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