Canada Welcomes Hong Kongers With Open Arms

Canada has created a three year work permit for recent college graduates (5 years or less out of school) holding Hong Kong passports.

As the South China Morning Post reported this week, the program is “huge” and “remarkable.” Why? Because the program does not: (1) require beneficiaries to have a job lined up on Canada; (2) restrict beneficiaries by age; (3) restrict beneficiaries based on financial data;  nor does it (4) restrict beneficiaries based on language ability.

Moreover, because the law was enacted as a response to Beijing’s controversial exertion of control in Hong Kong, beneficiaries will not be barred from obtaining Canadian work authorization because of any criminal convictions under the “national security law” that has been used against democratic protestors.

Canada intends to open a pathway to citizenship for recipients of this work permit in the future, one that will require “minimum language and education levels and one year of work experience in Canada”.

Other nations have scrambled to welcome Hong Kongers to their shores, as Minyao Wang noted a few weeks ago in talking about UK outreach to HK. (See also my post from July 2020).

The United States, unsurprisingly, has not. 

-KitJ