Asian Angle | Why China and Hong Kong must heed America’s immigration debate
As demographic crises loom across Asia, solutions like dropping the one-child policy will not be enough; the region must learn to embrace immigrants if it is to cope with a looming manpower shortage
The immigration debate now roiling the United States and paralysing Congress is about nothing less than two conflicting views of America itself – what the country is, and what it should be in the future.
Asia had better pay close attention, and particularly China, Japan and also Hong Kong. They are not having quite the same immigration debate as in the US. But they may have to soon.
The US, as we all know, is a land of immigrants, people bonded together over 2½ centuries not by a common ethnicity or cultural heritage or even, initially, language, but by a set of values and ideals. These would include individual rights, the freedom to start a business and make a living, freedom to practice any religion or none at all, equality of opportunity, respect for democratic institutions.
But that is about where the American consensus ends.
In the current debate – which is actually a recurrent one from over the years – one side, the conservatives, believes America’s history is actually European. Earlier waves of immigrants, the English, the Dutch, the Irish, later the Italians, Poles and Eastern Europeans, came to escape poverty and repression in their homelands and all shared the same continental, Judeo-Christian heritage. Assimilation was easy, as these migrants all learned English and all accepted the broad American covenant. They also all happened to be white.
