Immigration Laws: January, 2002 - Number #13

Hukou. On October 1, 2001, China relaxed its household registration or hukou system, adopted in 1958 to prevent rural-urban migration. Those who left the place in which they were registered were considered to be unauthorized migrants in the cities to which they moved, and were harassed, fined and often removed from the cities.

There are an estimated 130 million migrants- 10 percent of all Chinese- living away from the place in which they are registered. The central government ordered 20,000 smaller towns and cities across the country to give urban hukou to migrants who can prove they have a legal home and a stable source of income.

The new regulations do not cover Beijing or Shanghai. Beijing, with 14 million residents, has 820,000 non-permit-holding long-term residents, plus additional temporary migrant workers. Migrant women who marry Beijing men are not allowed to transfer their hukou to Beijing, making them unauthorized residents who also lose inheritance rights in their villages of origin if they do not return regularly. Their children are also unregistered, since the hukou is inherited through one's mother.

Families that include non-registered migrants do not get state-subsidized housing, and sometimes spend half of their $100 monthly salary on rent. Since 1998, children five and over are theoretically entitled to acquire an urban residence permit if at least one of their parents has one, eliminating extra school fees, but cities including Beijing have not done so.

Hong Kong. Secretary for Security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee said that if mainland children living in Hong Kong illegally want to go to school, they should return home. More than 100 children want to go to school as they try to obtain SAR (Special Administrative Region) residency rights. Ip said that, since immigration officials were trying to deport the children, it did not make sense to school them. Ip's critics assert that education is a basic right that the SAR provides to prisoners and provided to the children of Vietnamese refugees lived in camps in Hong Kong.

The governments of the Philippines (152,000 maids in Hong Kong), Indonesia (66,000), Thailand, and Nepal in a joint letter asked the Hong Kong government not to cut the minimum wage of foreign domestic workers (amahs), which is HK$3,670 ($476) a month or, according to the maids, $1 an hour for their very long six-day work weeks and 16-hour days. The four countries account for 98 percent of the 233,110 foreign domestic workers in the SAR as of October 2001.

In appealing to Hong Kong not to cut the maids' wages, Philippine Labor Secretary, Patricia Sto Tomas, said: "These service-level expatriate workers are the people who allow for a better quality of life for your people here. These are the people who are surrogate parents to your children, these are people who see to it that you have clean linen and hot food when you get home at the end of the day. These are the people who bring your kids to school." Tomas noted that, as a cabinet secretary, she earns 35,000 pesos (HK$5,350) a month.

About half of the amahs are college-educated mothers earning money to send their children to school back in the Philippines. Many gather at Statue Square on Sundays, go to St Joseph's Church on Garden Road, and send money home from WorldWide House. The Philippine government's Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) announced a new fee of $25 or P1,275 that women going to Hong Kong as maids would have to pay to obtain a required overseas employment certificate. This fee is in addition to the P100 clearance fee from the National Bureau of Investigation; the P3,000 processing fee charged by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration; and the passport fee that could go as high as $100.

The Employers of Foreign Domestic Helpers Association pushed for the wage cut, saying that their minimum wage rose from HK$450 a month in 1973 to HK$3,860 in 1997.

Tibet. China is building a $3.3 billion railroad from the city of Golmud to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa that is expected to increase the number of Chinese settlers in Tibet.