How & Why Hong Kong Seeks To Attract Foreign National Talent

Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Employment Visas, Family Visas, Investment Visas, Long Stay & PR, Musing, Special Programmes / 6 responses

How & Why Hong Kong Seeks To Attract Foreign National Talent

Globalization has led to a seemingly endless trend of migration of people around the world.

This includes the international movement of highly skilled workers, including specialists, researchers, business executives, managers and inter-company transferees.

Much of the motivation on the part of these professionals is the allure of the economic opportunities abroad that are greater than those available in their home countries.

As a result of this migration dynamic, the countries on the receiving end of the movement of these people experience the benefits of innovation stimulation, a greater pool of skilled human capital and the exchange of intellectual dynamism. These migrants also bring new money into the country with them.

Consequently, the national immigration agencies of developed economies find themselves in a battle to attract talent to their shores and have implemented migration programmes which facilitate the admission of these skills into their countries.

This includes making it much easier for foreign students to remain behind upon the completion of their formal education and take up employment or establishes or join in businesses.

Hong Kong is no exception. In the 2003 Report of the Task Force on Population it was stated that “Hong Kong must have the capacity to draw on the best and the brightest in the region and world-wide, including the populous and fast-developing Mainland”.

In the Chief Executive’s 2005 Policy Address, Mr Donald Tsang made it very clear:

“Like other world cities, Hong Kong must attract talent from around the world… the larger the pool of talent, the easier it is for a place to attract investment, thereby promoting economic development and increasing employment”.

This notwithstanding, Hong Kong has a number of “pull factors” which work to entice the highly skilled, well educated and consummately professional to live and settle in the HKSAR.

These include excellent employment opportunities, good pay, a low tax rate and relatively simple and efficient visa application procedures.

Geography, climate and cuisine also play a part too!

Moreover, Hong Kong has world class telecommunications, easy travel, excellent security and long-established racial tolerance.

Admission of highly skilled immigrants has always been part of the fabric of Hong Kong society.

Whilst the dynamic towards Mainland talent has, obviously, developed positively since 1997 under the One Country, Two Systems arrangements of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the immigration policy on entry for employment of foreign professionals, which is known as the General Employment Policy, has been in place for more than half a century.

Employment visas are issued to professionals “who possess special skills, knowledge, or experience of value to and not readily available in Hong Kong”. Investment visas are issued to those who are in a position to make a “substantial contribution to the economy of Hong Kong”. “Quality Migrants” and “Mainland Talents and Professionals” each have their own immigration programmes designed specifically with them in mind. Moreover, anyone graduating from a Hong Kong tertiary education institute is now effectively granted an employment visa post graduation almost as ‘of right’ under the “Immigration Arrangements for Non-Local Graduates“.

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The Path To Hong Kong Residency & Our Fantastic Low Tax Regime

Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Employment Visas, Family Visas, Infographic, Investment Visas, Long Stay & PR, Special Programmes / 4 responses

The Path To Hong Kong Residency & Our Fantastic Low Tax Regime

First Published June 4, 2012

Hong Kong has an open and flexible immigration policy that promotes and simplifies the relocation of foreign nationals possessing employment skills, business expertise, and capital to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). Moreover, their family members (spouse and unmarried children under 18) are also eligible for residence visas, which allow them to reside, work, and study in Hong Kong. Below is a scheme that highlights the available pathways to Hong Kong Residency so that you can benefit of the low tax regime that HKSAR offers.

No matter what type of Hong Kong visa you have secured, residency in Hong Kong offers fantastic tax benefits!

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Can I Get A Depedant Visa For An Elderly Parent If I Have A Permanent HK ID Card?

Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Family Visas, Your Question Answered / No responses

Can I Get A Depedant Visa For An Elderly Parent If I Have A Permanent HK ID Card?

I get 30-40 questions each week and not all of them merit a podcast answer. Some are answered quickly via email and for the next few days I’ll post some of these anonymised replies here.

A Depedant Visa For An Elderly Parent If I Have a Permanent HK ID Card?

QUESTION

My brother is an Indian born in Hong Kong. And he is holding a permanent ID card for Hong Kong. Currently, he is working in Hong Kong with a salary of HKD15,000 per month, speaking fluent Chinese. But his mother is living in India. She is about 72 years of age with no one looking after her. She wants to join her son in Hong Kong. Please let me know if her son can get her a permanent ID Card or any residential visa. To stay with him in Hong Kong.

ANSWER

Your mother can apply for a dependant visa sponsored by your brother. Apart from the application form and travel document, they need to show proof of employment, accommodation, and financial standing. They have to prove that they have arranged under the same roof in Hong Kong by providing a tenancy agreement or proof of ownership. A bank account with deposits covering rental fees of at least one year will be ideal.

It normally takes six weeks to process a visa/entry permit application for residence as a dependant upon receipt of all the required documents.

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I Lived In Hong Kong For 11 Years – And Have Been Gone For The Last 7 – Can I Still Get Permanent Residency?

Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Long Stay & PR, Your Question Answered / No responses

I Lived In Hong Kong For 11 Years – And Have Been Gone For The Last 7 – Can I Still Get Permanent Residency?

First Published July 11, 2018

It happens a lot more often than you might imagine. You’d think that the many early years in Hong Kong ought to count towards your right of abode but all too often disappointment is in the offing…

QUESTION

Thank you very much for this informative website! I hope you’ll be able to answer my question, I’m not sure if it’s a common scenario or not.

I was born in Singapore and I lived in Hong Kong from 1994 – 2005 (11 years) and moved when I was nearly 11 because of my father’s job, and it has now been 13 years since I left to go and live in Thailand.

My mother has a Hong Kong Permanent Identity Card (and was working for an airline there) but I do not. I had a dependant visa endorsed in my passport at the time I left with my parents.

This usually wouldn’t be a problem after leaving Hong Kong, however, there are two education sponsorship programs that I would like to apply for in Hong Kong which require you to have a permanent HKID.

I have gone to the immigration office about three times in the past 7 years as we do go back quite often, and every time we ask an officer, he says “if you are living in Hong Kong, you can apply for permanent residency.”

Is this true?

Seeing as I have already clocked up 11 years in Hong Kong, all I am missing in the application form is the current residency card.

Does this mean that if I go to university in Hong Kong starting August this year, that I could get my residency card, and then with that, apply for my permanent residency?

The way I see it, although I have been away for a considerably long time, but I am coming back, so this would technically be my 11th year total living in Hong Kong (and I have proof of having been there for 7 years ‘ordinarily’ with my school records, etc.)

I hope my question was clear enough and thank you very much in advance!

ANSWER

This is a very interesting question and it does strike a chord with quite a number of people in Hong Kong who find themselves in your situation.

So, I’m grateful to you for having raised the question and hopefully, I can shed some light on the situation and how your present Immigration Service in Hong Kong is affected by your life circumstances.

Your mother is a permanent Hong Kong Identity Card holder and on the basis that you had been born in Hong Kong and your mother had been a permanent Identity Card holder at that time then at the point of your birth your eligibility for a permanent Identity Card would have been established and effectively in the wake of that there could have been a very good opportunity for you to continue to argue now, so many years later that you are a permanent resident of Hong Kong.

However, that’s some theoretical and hypothetical in this situation because you weren’t born in Hong Kong, you were born in Singapore. So consequently, your eligibility for permanent Identity Card wasn’t established at the time of your birth and consequently, it meant that the immigration status that was available to you when you came back to Hong Kong with your mother was that at of a dependant Visa and as you’ve stated in your question you held the dependant Visa all the way through to the age of 11 and then effectively you left Hong Kong.

Now the interesting thing is that after you had been in Hong Kong as a dependant Visa holder just after your seventh, possibly your eighth birthday, you could have (or your parents could have) made an application to have your eligibility for a permanent Identity Card verified at the age of 11 years of age on the strength that you had been ordinarily resident in Hong Kong with your parents for a minimum of seven years and at that point you would have effectively been in the driving seat for a permanent Identity Card.

Subsequently, once you got to the age of eleven years when the Identity Card is issued to you and had that been, if that had occurred in fact, then effectively at the age of eleven you would have had your Identity Card issued to you possibly before you left Hong Kong and then on the basis that you have been back in Hong Kong on at least one occasion every three years thereafter your permanent Identity Card state, your right of abode in fact would have been maintained and effectively the question that you’re asking today would have been answered in the affirmative.

However, unfortunately because you only held a dependant visa for the first eleven years of your life in Hong Kong, at the time that you left with your parents to go off to Thailand effectively you abandoned your continuous ordinary residence at that time and what that means is that when you come back to Hong Kong in the future you’re going to have to get a student visa and the first eleven years of your life in Hong Kong effectively would have been lost.

So, it’s unfortunate, it’s certainly not going to assist you with the sponsorship programs that you’re lining up to make an application for but if it is any kind of consolation effectively what will happen in terms of your life going forward is that you’ll come back to Hong Kong as a student.

One would assume that you’ll spend three years here as a student, you’ll graduate. You’ll be able to join the workforce straight away if you start working for a Hong Kong employer within six months of you having graduated from university because the immigration arrangements for non-local graduates give you those privileges.

So that is, that’s effectively  going to take you to three and a half years and one assumes that a three to a four-year working career in Hong Kong we’ll have seen you continuously non-ordinary residence in Hong Kong again for the requisite seven years and then you’ll be able to go on to secure the right of abode as an adult in your own right but unfortunately in light of the facts that we’ve got in your question at the moment, you’re not going to be able to secure the right of abode at this point in time.

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Is It A Good Or A Bad Sign That The HKID Keep Coming Back With Further Requests For Information?

Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Employment Visas, Family Visas, Investment Visas, Refusals & Appeals, Special Programmes, Visitor Visas, Your Question Answered / No responses

Is It A Good Or A Bad Sign That The HKID Keep Coming Back With Further Requests For Information?

This question seeks to understand what you should make of repeat requests for information from the Hong Kong Immigration Department (HKID) during the course of your visa application.

QUESTION

“Good day.

In the course of what would appear to be a straightforward application, two sets of requests for further information have been sent by the Hong Kong Immigration Department.

One would have thought that they would have put all the relevant questions in one letter.

Is is usual to receive multiple requests like this?

Thanks”

ANSWER

The answer to this question very much depends on the type of visa application that’s in play.

For example, if it’s an investment visa application, that is a business investment visa application. Having three to four submissions subsequent to the initial application paperwork is not unusual at all and that usually plays out over the course of three to four months.

If it’s an employment visa application then two, three, four isn’t completely out of the ordinary, although four tends to be on the on the heavy end as it were.

Two to three is the middling range, and the reason why the immigration departments are making these requests for additional information is because they are building the story for themselves so that they can have specific clarification on the documents that have been submitted prior. So, it just depends very much on how substantial the first application is that went in.

It then depends on how the second request for information was dealt with, but a third and potentially a fourth could be a symptom of the weakness in the first set of information that you’ve put in or it could simply be that further questions have been raised as a result of the earlier information that they just need clarifying on.

So, it’s not out of the ordinary, I wouldn’t worry about it too much if you’ve got what you perceive to be a pretty straightforward case then it probably is a straightforward case. They’re just ticking some boxes and crossing and dotting the eyes and crossing the t’s to make sure that they can give the right outcome.

They do have a responsibility of course to consider all the factors and all the circumstances so I always view a request for further and better particulars as a good positive sign that things are going okay in the application rather than a negative sign. If it was a really negative sign you’d kind of expect that you’d get a denial rather than request for further information of the backend like that. Okay, hope that helps.

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How Important Are Employment Testimonials In A Hong Kong QMAS Visa Application?

Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Special Programmes, Your Question Answered / No responses

How Important Are Employment Testimonials In A Hong Kong QMAS Visa Application?

The Quality Migrant Admission Scheme is designed to attract ‘top notch’ talents to the HKSAR and, by my reckoning, only about 5% of applicants ever receive a Golden Ticket. Of course if you happen to have a Nobel prize or you are an Olympiad with a medal to your name, the odds of an approval are a lot higher. However, if you’re applying under the General Points Test, your educational accomplishments, professional background and career achievements to date are of vital importance. As is documenting them…

QUESTION

“Hi,

The QMAS visa documentation requires “Copies of testimonials from every employer claimed as relevant to your application.”

– Is it same as experience letters from current and ex-employers?

– If not, is there any particular format of these letters?

– Is it a mandatory document?

Thanks so  much!”

ANSWER

The Quality Migrant Admission Scheme, the quality of the documentation and supporting information that you’re going to submit in support of the application is of utmost priority.

Therefore, when you ask whether the copies of testimonials from other employer claims as relevant to your application and/or if they are the same as experience letters from current or ex-employers? Well, you could say it’s the same, but really what the immigration department are looking for is for tacit and express confirmation of the work experience that you’ve actually had once you were in those employments and it must go beyond just written confirmation that you say worked from this time to that time and you have such a job title. So, it really does go to the heart of the work that you’re doing when you’re working for those organizations.

There is no specific format, but you should try hard if at all possible to engage with past employers to speak in detail about what you actually did and contributed during your employment with them, as this is the only way immigration department can collaborate your claim on the application.

In terms of the mandatory nature of these testimonials, you could say that everything is mandatory if you expect the immigration department to approve the application. Typically, if they ask for something you should try your ever best to give it to them. If you find it is practically impossible as it can be because of sensitive area by past employments, if it’s practically impossible to get current and past employers to speak to the exact experience and quality of your work, or indeed your proven accomplishments while you were working for them, you might want to consider providing an independent third-party validation of the work that you were doing through, for example, the parties you interacted with who are credible and are able to substantiate in a roundabout way. The representation in the sections that you marked on the application but you find yourself unable to get the express confirmation from your prior employers.

So yes, thinking that would be, well actually could help to get such information in the hands of the immigration department without specifically putting your ex-employers to the task and the challenge in terms of authenticating what you achieved in the past while you were working for them but that should be taken as an adjunct to the confirmation of your employment and shouldn’t be a replacement for those testimonials.

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I Was Convicted Of A Crime And Removed From Hong Kong – How Do My Visa Options Look Now?

Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Employment Visas, Refusals & Appeals, Visitor Visas, Your Question Answered / No responses

I Was Convicted Of A Crime And Removed From Hong Kong – How Do My Visa Options Look Now?

First Published November 6, 2018

Life in Hong Kong can throw up many challenges, none too much greater than the following:

QUESTION

Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to ask my question! I have questions, but I will frame my situation first.

In June of this year, I made a big mistake and got in an altercation with another woman and ended up hurting her. In September, I was convicted of the crime of Wounding and sentenced to a prison term of 14 days in Hong Kong.

I had been working in Hong Kong for 2 years.

Prior to the conviction, I stopped working and remained in Hong Kong on a Visitor Visa while awaiting trial. My Visitor Visa was set to expire before the trial so I visited Immigration and requested an extension of 90 days. My extension was not granted and I was told to come back to Immigration following my court case. As I stated earlier I was then sentenced to a prison term, so I was unable to come to Immigration and my Visitor Visa expired whilst I was incarcerated.

Consequently, following the completion of my sentence, I was transferred to the Castle Peak Bay Immigration Centre and made subject to a removal order. I chose the option of voluntary repatriation and took a flight home to New Zealand three days later.

Prior to departure, my HKID card was confiscated by the Immigration Department. I asked my case officer at Immigration (and several other officers), as well as the Enquiry section on the Immigration website, and they all gave me the same response about my potential to return to Hong Kong on either a Visitor Visa or Employment Visa: “Please be rest assured that the entry of every visitor to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region would be considered fairly and reasonably in accordance with the law”.

 Question #1

I am now in New Zealand, but I would like to return to Hong Kong in January 2013. I would like to return on a tourist visa and take care of many responsibilities and possessions I have left in Hong Kong. I just fear arriving in Hong Kong, being detained at the border and then being sent back to New Zealand.

Question #2

I have a job offer in Hong Kong and I would like to accept it. However, I also don’t know how Immigration is going to view my employment visa application. It would be embarrassing and damaging to accept the job offer and then have my employment visa rejected. Also, would Immigration inform my potential employer of the reason for the employment visa rejection?

Thank you very much for your time!

ANSWER

I feel really bad for you because it seems to me as though you’re in a situation where you could be getting punished twice for the same mistake that you made and that’s not good.

But anyway, firstly, dealing with the questions. I understand that you want to come back to Hong Kong after you sort out your affairs, after having had your time in Hong Kong so briskly snatched away from you. I think your fear about being turned away at the border is valid and justifiable. My advice to you would be to make an application for a Visitor Visa in advance. And whilst there’s still no guarantee that if you possess a Visitor Visa the Officer at the border will let you in because they do still have discretion to admit or to refuse entry and you being removed from Hong Kong. At least you’ll be able to test the temperature of the Immigration Department in advance of coming to Hong Kong by making that application and seeing what they make of it. So yes, that would be my advice in relation to question one.

In relation to question two, like all things, if the Immigration Department determine that for security reasons they don’t want to admit you, then they will basically stop you from coming. Whilst they may be ready to give you a Visitor Visa to come and sort your affairs out, they may be less receptive to the idea that you can be a long stay Foreign National Resident again. Until you make your application you’re never going to know what sort of response you’re going to receive from the Department. I can say that essentially it’s an uphill struggle as you probably concluded for yourself. But in so far as being rejected for your Employment Visa, if you’re able to make that application, The Immigration Department will not advise your proposed employer as to the reason for that refusal so you don’t need to be concerned about that.

In the final analysis, it’s the department having a good look at you, what your track record has been, what the circumstances were surrounding your conviction and the comments of the Magistrates will be important too and their deliberations. And if you don’t make the application you’re never going to know. And in so far as the representations that were made to you prior to your departure by the Immigration Officers and what you heard or picked up from the Immigration Department website, effectively what they’re saying is just a restatement of the law and they will say that they are going to consider it fairly, and of course they will consider it fairly, but that doesn’t give any clear indication as to what sort of reception your applications might make.

I think the thing to bear in mind too is that when these representations were made to you, they were made to you while you were incarcerated so I wouldn’t read too much into what they have said. The key thing is to get your applications in and then see what the Immigration Department make of it. If you get a positive reception to your requests for a Visitor Visa prior to arrival then you may receive this, initially a positive response to your application for the Employment Visa. But at the point of them agreeing to you taking up that employment then you will have to show that you possess special skills, knowledge, and experiences that are not readily available in Hong Kong and that the Employer is justified in engaging your services as opposed to those of a local person. Do bear in mind that Mike Tyson, who was convicted for a considerably greater crime of rape, was granted an Employment Visa in the past, although it was only for one day. But it does give you an indication what the Immigration Department make of these circumstances and how they go about applying as you have been told the Application, the policy, being considered fairly and reasonable in accordance with the law.

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