IMMIGRATION AND TOURISM
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made on the Immigration Department. Its staff is being substantially increased and its organisation overhauled and streamlined.
Immigration Control
All immigration control points were extremely busy during the year, with the heaviest pressure on the control point at Lo Wu which dealt with over 7.7 million rail passengers between Hong Kong and China. This compares with 2.2 million passengers in 1977. The rapid growth in traffic is imposing great strains on the limited facilities at Lo Wu. Although it will be some years before new immigration control facilities at the rail terminus are completed, the situation should be improved in 1982 when additional temporary accom- modation will be available. A second immigration control point on the border was opened at Man Kam To in June 1981. This handles goods vehicles and passenger coaches travelling between Hong Kong and China. Other alternative routes for passengers to China are by ferry or hovercraft from a pier at Tai Kok Tsui, and by through train from the railway station at Hung Hom. Air services to China from Hong Kong International Airport also continued to expand..
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The temporary terminal for the Hong Kong - Macau ferry service was very heavily used, while work continues on a completely new and much larger permanent terminal. Traffic also increased substantially at the airport, where up to 85 immigration counters were regularly in operation during peak periods.
Personal Documentation
The demand for travel documents remained high during the year with over a million separate documents being issued. Re-Entry Permits for travel to China and Macau were the most sought after documents but there was also a substantial increase in the demand for passports for travel overseas. The programme of expanding and improving immigration branch offices continued during the year, and the Immigration Department was able to cope with this very heavy demand without the long queues at the branch offices which were common a few years ago.
There was great increase in the need to replace lost and damaged identity cards held by Hong Kong residents. During the year some 381 567 requests for replacement of identity cards were dealt with as compared with 206 000 in 1980, an increase of 85 per cent. The need to replace so many more cards arose from the enactment of legislation in October 1980 to require Hong Kong residents to carry acceptable proof of identity and banning the employment of those without identity cards. To enable this extra workload to be absorbed with the minimum inconvenience to the public, the workforce of the Registration of Persons Office was greatly increased; the main Kowloon office for the issue of identity cards was moved to a new and more spacious one in Tsim Sha Tsui East, and other offices were improved and expanded as the opportunity occurred.
Vietnamese Refugee's
There seems to be little prospect of an early end to the problem of Vietnamese boat refugees. Although there has been no resumption of large scale organised arrivals of refugees on the scale of the Huey Fong which brought 3 300 refugees to Hong Kong in December 1978, or the Skyluck which brought 2 600 in February 1979, the number of refugees arriving in Hong Kong during 1981 increased by 6.38 per cent over 1980.) The number of refugees in Hong Kong's care at the end of 1981 was 16 207, as against 24 065 a year earlier.