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Hong Kong woman finds job in UK – at one-tenth of her pay

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Hong Kong woman finds job in UK – at one-tenth of her pay
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Hong Kong woman finds job in UK – at one-tenth of her pay

2025-01-08 15:13 Last Updated At:15:13

THE ONLY JOB a Hong Kong teacher who moved to the UK on the BNO scheme could find was as an assistant in a nursing home—at one tenth of her usual pay.

Hong Kong teacher finds job in UK – at one-tenth of her pay

Hong Kong teacher finds job in UK – at one-tenth of her pay

And she’s not alone. Three years later, most Hong Kongers who went to UK are still looking for jobs—they are also struggling with the language and are short of money. Only 35 percent of BNO passport holders had found full time work, a new study showed—and that’s if you define “full time” as 30 hours a week. (For women, just 28 per cent have 30 hours of work a week.)

And many have problems, struggling with the language, unable to find work, and short of money, according to a new UK government-financed study.

– A woman who was board director’s secretary in Hong Kong is now working two cleaning jobs to try to make ends meet.

– A Hong Kong editor was now working as a waitress, a qualified accountant is working in a kitchen, a civil servant is now a prison guard, and so on.

Many Hong Kong women with children said they felt isolated without the home help most families have in their home town. “I can’t be at home all the time just playing the role of a mother,” lamented a woman in the northeast of England.

The BNO data comes from a series of studies by British Future. Its 2023 survey was based on research from 2,089 Hong Kongers in the UK, and the 2024 follow-up focused on in-depth interviews with 96 individuals.

TWIST IN THE TALE

The awful thing is that it is all entirely unnecessary.

The mainstream media (and many local media in Hong Kong) have long falsely reported that a mass exodus from the city was triggered by the 30 June 2020 adoption of a Western-style law against collusion with foreign forces.

But it wasn’t true. The big jump in applications for BNO passports actually happened in 2019. There was an eight-fold rise in applications that year, a UK freedom of information request made by the South China Morning Post revealed. That was when a mysterious disinformation campaign and massive cash handouts from unknown sources triggered violent protests over a G-7 recommendation to amend an extradition law.

The 2020 new law did not cause a further jump, despite what has been reported. So, to reinforce the west’s “China bad” narrative, the British took action the following year. From 31 January 2021, the British made a special emigration visa available for an estimated 5.4 million Hong Kong people.

This was a clear violation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, as Hong Kong law professor Grenville Cross pointed out. Even Britain’s then attorney general, Peter Goldsmith, made the same point in 2008.

The press not only hid this fact, but turned it upside down, saying that China had violated pre-handover agreements by introducing a national security law. Yet the opposite was true. Hong Kong’s Basic Law, drawn up in the British Hong Kong era, clearly said that the city should have a national security law. It was number 23 in its list of post-handover items of necessary legislation.

ANOTHER FAILURE

So the truth was that the National Security Law did not trigger an exodus. But the new British scheme ALSO failed to trigger one.

The revised British National Overseas (BNO) offer was ignored by 5.2 million (that’s 97 per cent) of Hong Kong’s passport-entitled residents. A mere 158,000 (three per cent) took up the offer over four years, according to the latest UK government statistics available, which date from September 2024.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s population has risen from 7,401,500 in 2021 to 7,531,800 this year. So even with the 158,000 BNOers calculated into the total, the city has 130,300 MORE people than it had. So, clearly not an exodus.

Furthermore, the number of Hong Kong people taking the BNO path to UK has dropped to just 5,100 in the three months most recently measured, the UK reported—a tiny number.

SIMPLE RACISM

Why do so many news media produce reports that imply that all the expats have left Hong Kong?

It’s simple racism. There are more people in Hong Kong, and more new people too. But there may be proportionally fewer white people in some sectors. For western journalists, only white people count.

HURTING EVERYONE

The British scheme hurt everyone. It hurt the community of Hong Kong, who didn’t deserve to have their home (a healthy, wealthy, low-crime city) painted as a terrible place from which people were fleeing.

It hurt the UK, which has been struggling with the immigration issue, which is causing polarization, pressure on facilities, resentment, and political instability.

And most of all, it hurt the Hong Kong people tricked into applying for BNO passports. The two British Future reports paint a worrying picture of a struggling community—and let’s not forget that this is a pro-UK, China-critical group, so they will be putting a positive spin on the situation.

Even the Hong Kong people who did find employment in the UK found it difficult to find jobs for which they were trained. “Our 2023 survey found that almost half of employed BNOs, of all levels of skill and qualifications, said that their job doesn’t match their skills and experience at all, or only a little,” researchers said.

10 SPECIFIC PROBLEMS OF THE HK BNOs

1) They struggle with spoken English, particularly with the many regional accents in the country.

2) The UK government provides subsidized language lessons, but BNOs are not allowed to even start that until three years after they have landed. This makes a long period without work.

3) When they try to set up a business or get professional training, they are refused loans or credit. Lenders require a credit history within the UK.

4) While food and schools are cheaper in the UK, the cost of council tax, energy bills, public transport, and eating out are higher.

5) The BNO visa includes a ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ condition which prevents them from accessing most in-work and out-of work benefits.

6) Public service workers in the UK often don’t know what rights BNO people have, so getting good information is very difficult.

7) People who are not full citizens can only get child care subsidies if they don’t have savings – but to get on the BNO scheme, you have to show that you have savings. This makes it tough for families.

8) Professional qualifications from Hong Kong are often not recognized in the UK.

9) Many BNOers can only afford to live in areas where there are few job vacancies.

10) People with transferable professional qualifications find they are regarded as lacking sufficient UK experience to practice their occupation, but are seen as having too much experience to enter at a lower level. Result: Even successful professionals struggle to find work.

CHANGES NEEDED

The report calls upon the government to make a series of changes to the law so the new immigrants can access taxpayer cash. But with the UK (and much of the western world) in a strongly anti-immigrant mood, the likelihood of that happening is not high.

A BNO man in the south west of England told the researchers that he felt low without a job: “My wife is very understanding and supportive. But at some point, you start to feel worthless, which is quite troubling and affects your mood.”




Lai See(利是)

** The blog article is the sole responsibility of the author and does not represent the position of our company. **

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A SHOCKING BRIEF HISTORY OF THE N.E.D. in 20 tweet-sized paragraphs

2025-02-05 10:55 Last Updated At:10:57

'SHOCKING AND ILLEGAL'

1) There was an outcry against the shocking and illegal overseas activities of the CIA overseas in the second half of the 1970s. Investigatory commissions wagged disapproving fingers, and wholesale reform was promised.

2) But instead of halting the black ops, the US held a series of meetings in the early 1980s which concluded that they should continue them under a nicer-sounding name. Thus the National Endowment for Democracy was born on November 18, 1983, in Washington DC.

3) The US public and the wider world were told that the NED was designed to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". This was misleading: the organization was and is funded by the US government.

FIRST STOP, MANILA

4) An early NED target was the Philippines. When socialist groups were becoming popular and troublesome in the mid-1980s, NED used classic CIA techniques to steer funds to private organizations and media to artificially change political outcomes.

5) At the time, journalists were allowed to print that NED was a CIA scam. The famous Allen Weinstein quote ("A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA") actually came from a 1991 interview, after about eight years of NED political interference ops.

6) The NED got larger and busier. Intelligence historian William Blum reported: "NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992."

7) The CIA-style illegality was often shocking. For example, the NED handed US$250,000 to an anti-Castro Miami group which in turn financed a Cuban terrorist named Luis Posada Carriles who was involved in groups which bombed hotels in Havana and blew up an aircraft.

THE LONG GAME IN CHINA

8) In 1994, the NED started setting up and/ or funding "pro-democracy" organizations in Hong Kong, designed to poison the minds of the local populace against mainland China, due to resume sovereignty over the city just three years later.

9) Also in 1994, the NED decided to make use of another old CIA front group, the American Institute for Free Labor Development. This was a nice-sounding unit that could be used to subvert genuine trade unions.

10) The NED started sending large sums of money regularly to a new group, the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions. But the city already had a Federation of Trade Unions. The media was told that the old trade union organization was "political" and must be labelled "pro-Beijing".

11) But the opposite was true. The old trade union group focused on workers' rights and collective bargaining, while the US allied one, according to NED paperwork, was financed to act as "a rallying point for the pro-democracy movement".

ENTER THE UYGHURS

12) NED worked worldwide. "In Haiti in the late 1990s, NED was busy working on behalf of right-wing groups who were united in their opposition to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his progressive ideology," wrote William Blum.

13) From at least 2004, NED began a program of handing millions of dollars to Uyghur insurgents, despite them being classified as terrorists. These Uyghurs committed a series of violent terrorist attacks in China between 2009 and 2014 which randomly killed scores of innocent people.

14) When China acted against the terrorists to re-train them for integration with society, NED-financed "Uyghur rights groups" (actually based in Washington DC or elsewhere in the west) accused the Chinese of building "concentration camps" for "millions" of innocents.

15) The NED's political interference ops continued worldwide. From 2013, NED and USAID provided tens of millions of dollars to the opposition in Bolivia to try to install a US-friendly puppet leader.

HONG KONG OP LAUNCHED

16) In 2018, Hong Kong obeyed a G-7 recommendation to introduce an extradition amendment. US agents used this as their official "flashpoint" to launch a disinformation campaign to paint it as a Beijing initiative to snatch dissidents to be "disappeared" over the border.

17) The result was a violent insurgency in Hong Kong that lasted more than five months in 2019, with billions of dollars' worth of damage to government buildings, the public transport network, and universities.

NEWS BLACKOUT

18) The NED conducted a massive political interference op in Moldova in 2024, which was reported in the media as "Russian meddling". The exact same thing happened in Georgia and Romania—and were similarly mis-characterised.

19) Bizarrely, the western mainstream media now runs an almost complete news blackout on NED ops worldwide, and almost all funding histories on the NED website have been removed from public access.

20) The January 2025 shuttering of the USAID website has given people around the world hope that the US might stop overseas political interference ops. But some of us point out that that was exactly what they said in the late 1970s—where this story started.

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