It is generally agreed that recent migrants from the mainland have been discriminated against in Hong Kong for many years. Yet, those people have been deliberately left out of the new anti-discrimination legislation proposed by the government.
The Home Affairs Bureau says migrants should not be included under the Race Discrimination Bill because they, like most people in Hong Kong, are Chinese. Home Affairs Secretary Patrick Ho Chi-ping noted in March that mainlanders 'occasionally suffer from discrimination by the local Chinese in Hong Kong'. But he called it a social, not racial, bias.
There are two easy ways of tackling this problem: either rename the legislation the Racial and Social Discrimination Bill, or enact a separate law at the same time to deal with mainland migrants. Yet, the government persists in doing nothing.
If there is to be a separate law, the government says, then it must go through the whole process of public consultation again. That took a decade for the race bill.
We should recall that the government in 1996 conducted a study on racial discrimination that included new arrivals from the mainland.
In 1997, when it published a consultation paper, it again included mainland migrants.