6:9
The Prime Minister and representatives of the Opposition have said that there is simply no way in which the British Government could give the right of abode to all the people of Hong Kong. That, they say, would be an enormous new immigration commitment on an unprecedented scale, and would entail commitments that no future British Government could possibly meet. It is anticipated that the right of abode will be extended to some people in the private and public sector on the basis of the value of their services to Hong Kong and their connections with Britain, but this is not expected to involve large numbers of people.
6:10
It must be assumed that this political judgement is based on assumptions about the British electorate, not the strength of the case that is being put forward from Hong Kong. We need to examine therefore the considerations which may have led politicians to these conclusions.
6:11
One legitimate fear might be that the British economy could not stand the arrival of large numbers of people from Hong Kong without suffering severe damage. In fact the only economic analysis available so far, made under the leadership of Professor Bernard Corry of Queen Mary College, London, for the South China Sunday Morning Post, points in the opposite direction. The report concludes that even in the "worst case scenario", if all 3.25 million British Passport Holders in Hong Kong were to arrive in Britain, Britain stands to benefit. The entrepreneurial qualities which some Hong Kong immigrants would be likely to bring would probably do more to give Britain's enterprise economy a new lease of life than anything else. Sir Geoffrey Howe once described his original conception of enterprize zones in declining city areas as "minature Hong Kongs". If there is resistance to restoring the right of abode on economic grounds, that case has yet to be made.
6:12
We may need to be reminded that if Hong Kong British Passport holders were to exercise a restored right of abode in Britain, it would not necessarily be with the intention of remaining here. They would have full rights of entry to any country of the European Community, to exercise their skills wherever they could earn a living and to settle anywhere in our common European home, in precisely the same way as is already open to Portuguese people of Chinese origin from Macao.
6:13
If economic considerations are not the basis of the Government's refusal to restore the right of abode, what are the considerations that have carried the day? Perhaps the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants got the matter about right in its 1985 Report:
"The barrier to acceptance of a residual moral responsibility for people who have lived under British rule, and whose future has been negotiated over their heads is the same barrier which has for twenty years obstructed justice and morality in British nationality and immigration law: the fear of non-white immigration to Britain. It is not merely a question of numbers, but of colour. Millions of other people from overseas have an
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