Their kids are HKers. They work as migrant labourers in the city to raise them

Crossing the Shenzhen border on an early morning in mid-October, a joyful Joseph finally set foot in Hong Kong, where his two children have lived for over 10 years, with the right to work.

In his mid 30s and from mainland China, Joseph has landed a job as a waiter in a New Territories restaurant under a migrant worker scheme introduced last year. He must live in a dormitory arranged by his employer, according to policies governing non-local labour, and will only be able to visit his children in town during his time off. 

Nevertheless, he will take home a monthly salary of around HK$12,000 after accommodation fees are deducted – almost double what he earned working as a delivery person in a small city in mainland China. 

“I used to earn nearly RMB7,000 per month, sending RMB6,000 to my wife in Hong Kong. She does not have the right to work there, and she and the children all rely on me, ”Joseph, who asked to use a pseudonym, told HKFP in Cantonese. 

To fill mostly manual jobs amid a manpower shortage, the Hong Kong government expanded the number of non-local hires permitted in certain industries such as construction, and started allowing migrant workers take up 26 low-skilled jobs for two years.

The schemes have also extended a lifeline to members of a large but neglected group known as “double-nots,” tens of thousands of mainland Chinese whose children were born in Hong Kong, and thus secured permanent residency, but who had no right to work in the city themselves.

Joseph told HKFP by phone that his family had barely made ends meet in one of the world’s most expensive cities. To save money, he only visited his children in Hong Kong once or twice a year. 

This was not what he envisaged when he got married in 2009. He met his wife, who was also from the Guangdong countryside, while working in Shenzhen, and she fell pregnant a year after their wedding.  

Chinese authorities enforce a strict household registration system called “hukou,” under which residents are categorised as urban or rural, and children automatically inherit their parents hukou. Hukou ties access to education and other social benefits to a person’s place of birth, with those born with an urban hukou afforded greater opportunities.

Like many Chinese people from rural areas, Joseph wanted his children to enjoy the good fortunes of an urban resident. And he found a solution in the city just across the river from Shenzhen. “My auntie in Hong Kong told me that we were allowed to give birth in Hong Kong, and for the children’s development, Hong Kong was a better choice,” Joseph said. 

His wife Rose, who also spoke to HKFP under a pseudonym, said she had been worried about giving birth in Hong Kong. As non-local parents, they had to pay HK$39,000 to its public hospitals, in addition to the expenses of raising the children in the years ahead.  

“But my husband wanted to provide a better future for our kids,” Rose said in Cantonese. In early 2011, their little girl was born in Hong Kong, followed by a boy in late 2012. And thus they joined the double-nots.

Mainland income, Hong Kong expenses

The community largely arose due to a 2002 landmark judgement by Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, which ruled that children born in Hong Kong to a mainland Chinese woman had the right of abode, even if neither of the parents were permanent residents. 

After the ruling, the number of double-not or “anchor” children rose quickly as more mainland Chinese travelled to semi-autonomous Hong Kong. The number peaked in 2011, when 35,736 double not children were born – 37 per cent of total births that year. 

Public and private hospitals initially welcomed the birth tourism trend, but as the numbers grew, local residents fretted about pressure on medical and educational resources. 

On January 1, 2013, the government banned the practice after hundreds of local parents marched in protest against double-not parents and their children. 

However, a total of 202,314 such babies had been born in Hong Kong from 2001 to 2012, forming a struggling community. They lack hukou in mainland China and are therefore not entitled to enjoy public education or medical resources there, but in Hong Kong, they have no legal local guardians to rely on. 

In Sham Shui Po, one of the city’s poorest districts, social worker Wendy Huang with the Society for Community Organization (SoCO) has been serving this group since 2010. 

Huang said that some of the more affluent double-not parents had managed to enrol their children in private schools in China or have them travel to Hong Kong as cross-border students. But the 400 double-not families she served were low-income ones, often with mothers staying in the city on two-way travel permits, similar to visitors’ visas, to take care of their young children. 

“Most of them rely on savings, the income of their husband from mainland China, or by borrowing money from relatives and friends,” Huang said in Cantonese. But more than a decade after birth tourism was banned, many families have exhausted their savings and are heavily in debt.

In 2014, Rose quit her job as an accountant in Shenzhen and migrated to Hong Kong with her two toddlers. Since then, she has lived in subdivided flats in Sham Shui Po and struggled to pay their way. 

“Things were much cheaper in the early days, and I made sure the three of us spent no more than HK$20 per day for meals,” Rose said. Ten years on, the daily meal budget for the trio has risen to HK$60. 

“I cook three meals per day, packing lunch boxes for the kids, who are now secondary students, and we never dine out,” Rose said. She spends nearly HK$4,000 per month to rent a subdivided flat that measures less than 10 square metres. It was the cheapest one she could find. 

While the cost of living in Hong Kong kept rising, Joseph’s earnings in mainland China fell. After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, he struggled to find work and started doing deliveries.  

To get the job as a waiter job in a Hong Kong restaurant, he had to borrow from relatives to pay advance fees of around HK$30,000 to an employment agent.

One of the lucky ones

Tiffany, another double-not mother, declined to say how much she had paid an agent to get a job as a migrant worker in a residential care home, but she said it was much more than Joseph had paid.

She had to borrow the money for the fee but was desperate to work. 

 “I can’t tell you exactly how much I paid the agent, otherwise they will refuse to help me to renew my visa,” Tiffany said in Cantonese, also speaking under a pseudonym. But she is nearly 50 and can’t pick and choose what she does, she added, given the younger competition.  

The former salesperson in Guangzhou arrived in Hong Kong in 2012 to give birth to her second child, a choice she had to make to save the baby. 

China enacted a one-child policy until January 2016. “Some of my friends were forced to abort their second babies. I had an unplanned pregnancy… what could I do?” Tiffany said. 

In 2015, she quit her job in Guangzhou and migrated to Hong Kong with the little boy, who was due for enrolment in kindergarten. She had divorced her husband and raised her son alone in Hong Kong while her ex-partner raised their daughter in Guangzhou.

For nine years, she was unable to find a job in Hong Kong. “At first I relied on my savings and later my elder brother [in mainland China] supported me,” Tiffany said. “I was very frugal, saving the meat, if there was any, for my son. Later I suffered from anaemia.”

As soon as the non-local worker scheme was announced, Tiffany reached out to an agent. After almost a year of training and interviews, she finally secured a job in a care home in May with a monthly salary of around HK$13,000 after accommodation expenses were deducted.

While she must live in a dormitory arranged by her employer, her son is now being cared for by his elder sister, who secured a place at a Hong Kong university. Tiffany feels she is among the luckier double-not parents. 

“Many of the double-not families I know cannot join the scheme as most of their children are 13 to 14. You just can’t leave them at home and live in a dormitory,” she said. 

The social worker Huang said many double-not families had expressed interest in working as non-local labour to support their families since the government last summer expanded the sectors and the quota for the scheme. 

But those who had found jobs as migrant workers were still a minority, Huang said, given the high agency fees and opaque practices. 

SoCO has proposed granting special work visas to double-not parents, arguing that this group would be a source of labour for the city. It says extreme poverty among the parents will harm the development of their children, who are Hong Kong permanent residents. 

According to the Social Welfare Department, if a double-not child is being taken care of their relatives in Hong Kong and the family fall into financial difficulty, they can apply for social security allowances along with the child. It does not allow the child to be granted an allowance.

The next generation

Amid a wave of emigration following the 2019 protests and unrest, the Hong Kong government rolled out multiple schemes to attract top talent, high earners, specialist workers, and low-skilled migrant labourers.

With all the new policies, Tiffany felt that double-not parents raising their children in Hong Kong had been forgotten.

Huang said her advocacy for this group had achieved little over the years beyond incremental changes, and few lawmakers were concerned about them. 

Tik Chi-yuen, a lawmaker from the social welfare sector, told HKFP that double-not parents and children were not a priority of the government, with the parents seen solely as visitors by authorities. 

“The government has not thought about any measures to support the families, except for imposing a ban [on the parents]. Local residents have always had negative feelings about this group, and that just leaves a few NGOs helping them from a humanitarian perspective,” Tik said.

For years, double-not single mother Annie Li relied on herself to get by. At first she raised her daughter in Shenzhen. When her little girl turned three, Li would wake her up at 6 am and take her across the border to a Hong Kong kindergarten, until one day her daughter fell sick and a doctor advised against making the long journey every day. 

So, Li enrolled her daughter in a school in Kwai Fong, and became a cross-border worker, travelling daily to Shenzhen to work as a domestic worker after taking the little girl to school. 

“What I earned in Shenzhen barely covered the rent of our subdivided unit,” Li said. But since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, she has been unable to find a job in mainland China amid a worsening economic outlook.

“I have lived by borrowing money from others over the past few years. My daughter is still very young. How could I dare leave her alone at home to work as non-local labour [and be required to live a dormitory]?” Li said. 

For the double-not parents turned migrant workers, the future looks uncertain. In recent weeks, local unions and labour advisors have repeatedly urged the government to review non-local labour schemes amid rising unemployment and slow business.

Joseph said he sometimes regretted becoming a double-not parent. 

“But everyone lives for their children, their next generation, right? No matter what happens, I hope to survive the next few years, and then my kids will have completed secondary school.” Joseph said.

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