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50.
DSR 11C (Revised 5/87)
These 1,000
In December 1988, the Government announced that they
were prepared in principle to accept for resettlement an
additional 1,000 Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong over
the next 2-3 years, provided that other Governments were
prepared to contribute commensurately.
refugees would include relatives of Vietnamese already
here and others with the potential quickly to become
self-sufficient in the United Kingdom, together with some
who had been in the refugee centres for a long time and
had not yet been accepted elsewhere. The Government have
conducted an intensive diplomatic campaign to urge other
resettlement countries to respond to this initiative.
The response to our call has been very good and amounts
to a significantly increased international effort.
Accordingly, the Government have decided to proceed with
the new resettlement plans. The refugees will be
resettled in ways which minimise the pressure on housing
resources in certain urban areas of the country. A major
international effort is now required to resettle the
15,000 boat people in Hong Kong who have refugee status.
But it is crucial to the success of this that there
should be no further significant influx of boat people.
XI:
Emigration
51.
Population mobility has long been a feature of Hong
Kong: many of the territory's residents migrated from
China and elsewhere and there is a well-established
tradition of going overseas for education, training,
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