In this section of the talk, I talk about the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme (QMAS) – this much maligned programme that is ‘on the books’ so we continue to provide coverage of it (of course!)
The purpose of the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme is to attract highly skilled or talented individuals to settle in Hong Kong, with the aim of enhancing Hong Kong’s economic competitiveness. Unlike other visa schemes, successful applicants are not required to have secured a job offer in Hong Kong prior to their arrival. However, all applicants must meet a set of prerequisites before they can be awarded points under one of the two points-based tests: the General Points Test and the Achievement-based Points Test. These tests are used to assess applicants’ eligibility and allocate quotas accordingly.
To apply for the Scheme, the applicant must:
– Be at least 18 years old
– Prove financial capability to support themselves and any dependents during their stay without public assistance
– Have no criminal or immigration records
– Be proficient in Chinese or English
– Have a good education background, preferably with a university degree or equivalent qualifications
If the applicant fails to provide satisfactory documents to prove that they meet these requirements, their application will be refused immediately.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
In this short piece, I discuss the impact on our practice when clients leave their Hong Kong visa extension applications to the very last minute!
In this occasional series of commentary, I provide a peek inside our professional practice and offer a glimpse of what it’s like to be part of the Hong Kong Visa Centreteam.
Leaving your Hong Kong visa extension application to the very last minute can be an absolute nightmare because there is a quota that the Immigration Department has each day that is allocated to people seeking to extend their visas and, of course, a lot of people leave it to the very last minute and it can be that the visa is going to expire within a day or two, and it can mean as queuing up at six o’clock in the morning to get access to the quota for the day. However, humans are humans, and things get left to the last minute very often; it’s not an ideal situation, therefore we try to encourage clients not to do that, but we service them and try and give them the best possible outcome that’s available, all things considered.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
The unconditional stay covers the instances where a long-stay foreign national resident is in a position to make an application for the Right of Abode but they genuinely cannot put their hand on their heart and say that they’ve taken Hong Kong as their only place of Permanent Residence and, in that instance, because of the fact that one of the application forms the ROP146 calls for that declaration, if you can’t make that declaration you can’t get the Right of Abode; however, what you can do instead of getting the Right of Abode is making an application for unconditional stay and essentially it’s the same test for approval – seven years continuous ordinary residence in Hong Kong, and if you can satisfy that test but you can’t make the Declaration then you can have your stays adjusted to unconditional stay.
The unconditional stay relieves you of all the limits to your existing residence in Hong Kong so there’s no imposition on the limit of stay and what you can do whilst you hold unconditional stay, so this is a really useful immigration status.
Before a case that was settled at the end of the 90s, the unconditional stay application was a pre-requisite for obtaining the Right of Abode, but the Supreme Court said this is not constitutional because you’re allowing the director of immigration the ability to roadblock somebody’s potential to want to get the Right of Abode; so now there’s no requirement to get unconditional stay first, you can go directly to the Right of Abode the test for approval is exactly the same as for the unconditional stay.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
I have given this talk around town for the last couple of years now and so pleased to finally add it to our coverage of the Hong Kong investment visa, specifically discussing the Hong Kong investment visa for Mainland Chinese applicants.
The talk was graciously hosted at WYND Co-working Space, ran by a group of great people who I have a lot of time for.
An old chestnut this question which comes up time and time again about getting a Hong Kong work visa with no degree – albeit this time in the context of a technical apprenticeship undertaken straight out of senior high school.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
I moved to Hong Kong from France one month ago.
I came here together with my boyfriend who has started to work here (we are not married, so no dependant visa!!).
In France I was working for Company A as a customer service agent. I actually also got a job at Company A here in Hong Kong before I arrived here.
But I don’t have a university degree. I did my A-Levels in France followed by a 2,5 year apprenticeship in my niche and after that I worked there for about 2 years.
What are my chances to get the working visa, without holding a University degree?
ANSWER
The General Employment Policyin Hong Kong calls for applicants for employment visas to have a university degree; however, what happens if you don’t have a university degree but have technical qualifications instead? Could an applicant who possesses special skills, knowledge, or experience of value to and not readily available in Hong Kong, obtain an employment visa?
Generally, an employment visa applicant is expected to have a university degree and at least two years post-graduation working experience in a managerial or supervisory capacity; however, what happens in real life is that not everybody goes to university and there are plenty of people in Hong Kong who do have working visas but they never went to university themselves; therefore, how did they get their visas?
Essentially, the Immigration Department have a certain amount of flexibility and in general terms, if you don’t have a university degree but you have technical qualifications the immigration department will expect you to have at least five years post-qualification working experience in the managerial or supervisory capacity, and if you don’t have technical qualifications you’re expected to have at least 10 years of working experience in a managerial or supervisory capacity; so, in this instance it seems to me that you haven’t yet quite met the five years post-qualification working experience in the managerial or supervisory capacity that you need and therefore I suspect you might find it difficult to persuade the Immigration Department that you should be granted an employment visa in your circumstances; and, of course, aligned with all of this, is this overarching question – does the work that’s being offered to you, can actually be undertaken by a local person, and that’s an objective test and the immigration department will make the determination based on all of the evidence that they’ve got bundled up inside the application.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
Employment law and immigration law are often overlapping but must be dealt with separately…this post talks about what can be done if someone’s employment contract ends on the same day as their Hong Kong work visa, but they need to stay in Hong Kong for a while longer to sort out their affairs.
What can I do If my employment contract ends on the same day as my Hong Kong work visa and I need to stay here a while longer to sort out my affairs?
QUESTION
I am in a fix with a difficult-to-deal-with local company.
My 2 year contract with them expires this October 20. My work visa expires on the same day.
Is my employer legally required to serve a one month notice?
If the HR Department mention nothing to me, is my last day at work October 20, and am I required to leave the country? I am Canadian.
Is my employer required to contact the Immigration Department and notify them of my employment ending? At what date?
If I leave Hong Kong on the 20th of October to Macau for the night and return on the 21st, can I come in on a 3 month visitor visa so I can pack up the house?
Or is it better to go to the Immigration Department on the 18th/19th and apply for an extension to pack up my things and leave Hong Kong?
ANSWER
Whilst I’m not an employment lawyer, I’m not really qualified to discuss matters of employment law, it does seem to me that if you have a fixed term employment contract which is going to expire in your case as of October the 20th, then you need to look to your contract to see if there is any arrangement that speaks to an extension of that employment contract and if there is a specific notice period that the employer will need to give you in order to advise you of the termination of your employment as at the date of your contract termination too.
So look to the contract to see what that’s all about. But, in any event, all of that notwithstanding the question of your ongoing employment visa is tied directly to your ongoing employment. Therefore, if your employer has not yet indicated the possibility of an extension to your employment contract it will be the case that come October 20, when your current employment visa expires, effectively you will no longer be lawfully employable in Hong Kong.
I understand your challenge insomuch as well if you’re no longer going to be working in Hong Kong after October the 20th, you can’t just, in a sense, stop working and then mystically, magically wonderfully, before midnight that day head off back to Canada.
You’re going to need to have some time in order to manage your affairs here in the wake of your intending departure. So there are two things that you can do. One which is recommended, one which I would suggest you avoid.
The first thing that you can do is to go down to the immigration department on the 21st and explain effectively what your situation is and ask them to give you an extension.
You may find that they will give you a temporary extension for perhaps a week, maybe two at the most in your circumstances. And that is barely recommended because of the way that the immigration officers in immigration tower usually consider these applications.
The second option that you have, which is the one that I recommend, is that on the 20 October, you take the 11:00 p.m. ferry to Macau, and then after you’ve arrived in Macau, immediately jump back on the 01:00 a.m. ferry on the 21 October back to Hong Kong, and then the immigration officer upon arrival will admit you as a Canadian national for 90 days as a visitor, and that three months will then give you all the time that you need to finalise your affairs and make your exit from Hong Kong to return home. So, that’s what I would suggest you do.
I hope you find this useful.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
This question gets to the heart of permitted activity as a Visitor and the ability to remain here on an indefinite basis on that status.
QUESTION
Hi, I am a New Zealander currently staying in Hong Kong with my partner who is a permanent HKID card holder.
I do not have a HKID card, just a tourist visa, and I wish to study a university degree via correspondence (online study) from a UK university.
Do I need a Hong Kong student visa or a visa of any kind to do this?
ANSWER
The final analysis, whatever is deemed to be permitted activity as a visitor visa holder is actually driven by the determination of the Immigration Department to prosecute for breach of conditions of stay. And so, in my experience, if you’ve made the decision that you want to remain physically in Hong Kong and undertake a course of study with a foreign education institute, doing it online remotely, I believe you’d be very unlucky or unfortunate for the Immigration Department to want to prosecute you for breach of conditions of stay.
So, I’d certainly hazard a very positive guess that you’d be perfectly okay to undertake that course of study while you’re in Hong Kong as a visitor. But that’s not the real issue here. The real issue is the fact that you’re obviously intending to remain here on an indefinite long stay basis, and the visitor visa category isn’t really designed for people to stay in Hong Kong on an indefinite long stay basis; therefore, you need to have a formal rationale for being in Hong Kong on a long stay indefinite basis. However, considering the current circumstances that you find yourself in, unfortunately you’re in a round peg square hole situation – you’re here with your partner who’s a permanent identity card holder, but you’re not married to him and therefore the rationale of dependency and family reunion doesn’t strictly apply. Thus, you can’t get yourself a legal dependence visa. If you have had a history of prior cohabitation with your partner, particularly overseas, prior to arriving in Hong Kong, it becomes possible to conceive of you procuring a prolonged visitor visa on the strength of your pre-existing relationship and that in a know would couch you as de facto spouses.
However, if it’s a boyfriend- girlfriend-type situation and the relationship is relatively new (and relatively new for these purposes is sort of two years or less) you may struggle to persuade the Immigration Department to grant you a prolonged visitor visa for you to remain in Hong Kong under his charge, as it were.
Apart from that, what you’re then left with, is running the gauntlets of the Shenzhen shuttle or frequently coming and going across the boundaries in other ways, flying possibly back to New Zealand every now and again when your 90-day period of stay as a visitor comes up for renewal.
So unfortunately, what you have at the moment is quite an unsustainable situation that is going to, at some stage or other, catch up with you.
I’ve included in this post a number of resources that deal with the question of being a long stay visitor in Hong Kong, and how the Immigration Department view these arrangements.
So, as I say, love will conquer all. I’m certain that you’ll be able to come to some sort of arrangement that will allow you to solve your problem, but it’s certainly not going to be plain sailing from here on in, and there’s certainly no visa category degree that addresses the rationale of remaining in Hong Kong in order to undertake a course of study with a remote foreign university.
I hope this helps!
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
