CONFIDENTIAL
7. Secondly, the financial burden on Hong Kong is now formidable. The new screening policy means that all arrivals need to be detained in closed centres requiring a high degree of security and qualified staff to maintain discipline and order. This involves considerable capital and recurring expenditure. The Hong Kong Government have already committed £60 million in the current financial year (having spent £48 million last year). If arrivals continue
at the present rate, substantially more will be needed.
8. Thirdly, and for reasons closely related to the previous two, local attitudes to the problem have changed for the worse. In 1979 there was a degree of local sympathy for the boat people, many of whom were ethnic Chinese escaping
persecution in Vietnam. Now there is enormous resentment of
the new arrivals, almost all of whom are ethnic Vietnamese motivated not by a fear of persecution but by a desire for a better standard of living. Hong Kong Chinese ask why the boat people are not promptly repatriated to Vietnam and compare their treatment with that accorded to ethnic Chinese entering Hong Kong illegally from China (some 20,000 per
year) who are sent back within 48 hours. There is a widespread feeling that the first asylum policy and the problems which that entails have been imposed on Hong Kong by HMG and that Hong Kong has been left to pick up the bill. There are increasingly strident calls for the policy of first asylum to be abandoned or for HMG to face the
financial consequences.
9. Fourthly, and potentially most serious of all, the political situation in Hong Kong has changed significantly. Since the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong, and following the introduction in
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/1985