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.
