XN000022-1996-04-02 — Page 2

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Transcript of the Governor media session at Immigration Dept

Following is the transcript of the media session by the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, after visiting the Immigration Department this (Tuesday) afternoon:

Governor: I wanted to visit the Immigration Department today to express my gratitude and the rest of the Government's gratitude to all the officers who've worked here for the extraordinary job that they've done in recent weeks and months in processing so many naturalisation applications. It really has been a huge task. They've dealt, I think, with over 230,000 naturalisation applications since the beginning of the year. The numbers grew, or grew over short periods as the year went past. I think I'm right in saying that we got down to about 180,000 in the last month or so, 50,000 on the last day alone, 100,000 in the last week. So it's been a really enormous task for all our officers here. They've now got the job as you see of interviewing and carrying through the applications to I hope in most cases a successful conclusion. It's a very large job for them all and I'm sure that the whole community is very grateful for the work they're doing, for the long hours they're working in order to deal with these applications in the six-month period. It's important for us to get everything done in good time before the transfer of sovereignty in 1997. So I'm grateful to the Director and all his staff for the excellent job that they've done.

Question: Governor, why do you think there was such a huge spark towards the end? Do you think that things like the Preparatory Committee's vote to set up a provisional legislature might have triggered off some of the applications?

Governor: You'd have to speak to those who applied; there was plenty of time to talk to some of them in the queues and I'm sure that you managed to have one or two interviews. I don't think I can easily speculate about the reasons. I think the main reason why so many people applied at the last minute is because people do things at the last minute. I think it's also true that people in Hong Kong are understandably very concerned about ease of travel after 1997. This is a truly international community. It's a very open society. As one of the greatest trading cities in the world, people perfectly naturally think about their prosperity being very directly related to their ability to move around from country to country, from continent to continent as easily as possible. So I would guess that the overwhelming reason was people's concern that they should have travel made as easy after 1997 as possible.