Hong Kong, Once a Haven for Asylum, Closing Doors to Refugees

“David” is a 35-year-old asylum seeker from East Africa. He fled to Hong Kong two years ago and since then he's been sharing a subdivided flat in Jordan with a roommate. Rent costs $4,800 a month. “I have to beg to pay rent,” the former operations manager says, who can’t use his real name in fear of having his claim for asylum rejected.

David is one of the city’s some 11,000 non-refoulement claimants—meaning he has a legitimate fear of being tortured or killed if he returns home. For the last two years, he's been waiting to be put through the government’s unified screening mechanism (USM) for asylum seekers. The USM promises a six-month wait from the time a claim is lodged to an arrival at an initial decision, but Labour Party vice-chairman Fernando Cheung Chiu-hung, who is an advocate for asylum seekers, says that the wait is often much longer. “Some wait more than five years. I know of a man who waited 12 years. They just want their lives back,” he says.

A group of more than 170 individuals and organizations—representatives met the press on Monday at the Legislative Council—says for people like David, their plight in Hong Kong will only get more challenging. Recently there's been a wave of media reports and calls for stricter control to tackle a rise in the number of claimants and alleged abuses of the USM. In the past month alone, there have been more than 400 reports in Hong Kong media on so-called "fake asylum seekers" and illegal immigrants, blaming them for everything from petty crime to drug smuggling.

“Suddenly, [asylum seekers] started to be referred to as ‘illegal immigrants.’" says Victoria Wisniewski Otero, a representative of the Refugee Concern Network and advocacy and campaigns manager at the Justice Centre Hong Kong. “This is an inaccurate term and there are differences between migrants and refugees.”

In January, the government vowed to “intercept illegal immigrants at source and to expedite the screening process to remove unsubstantiated claimants to their country of origin as soon as possible” in response to a growing number of claimants and alleged abuses of the system.

Last month, Hong Kong and mainland authorities launched a large-scale crackdown arresting some 3,000 South and Southeast Asians—most of them from Vietnam and Pakistan. This hints at a tougher road ahead for asylum seekers—according to immigration records, nearly half of all asylum claimants are smuggled into Hong Kong. Lax visa restrictions in China mean it’s relatively easy for asylum seekers to enter Hong Kong via the mainland.