New immigrants don’t deserve the hardships they face: the seven-year rule debate

This article is a rewrite of a report from August 2012.

Poverty in Hong Kong concentrates among the elderly and new immigrants. Elderly poverty stems from the welfare system’s lack of pension provision — the government’s later MPF arrived too little, too late for those already old. New immigrants fared worse still.

Why couldn’t new immigrants get welfare?

The seven-year continuous residence rule. The Basic Law grants Hong Kong residents social welfare in accordance with law, yet requires seven years’ residence to qualify. The elderly at least had inadequate-but-existing provisions; new immigrants and their children, short of seven years, qualified for nothing — second-class citizens for the seven years before permanent residency, despite meeting every other requirement.

The author, a Hong Kong university researcher, argued the seven-year “internship” was reasonable for non-immigrants becoming permanent residents — but for immigrants already through a naturalisation-acceptance process, the wait should shrink. Trapping them in poverty for seven years carried social costs — family breakdown, exclusion, even crime — far exceeding seven years of welfare spending.

What did the social-investment lens show?

Modern welfare thinking means social investment in human capital: these immigrants would become permanent residents after seven years anyway, so investing in them and their children early beat waiting out seven years of poverty. Children raised in deprivation and strained marriages would trap families in poverty cycles long after benefits arrived.

The author’s prescription: even without changing the Basic Law, the SAR government should build welfare schemes targeting new immigrants at the poverty line — it had both the resources and the obligation to extend social citizenship once immigrant status was granted.