ABSTRACT
After the passage of the United States Immigration Act in 1965, many Hong Kong immigrants escaped the economic and political uncertainties of Hong Kong and found refuge in New York’s Chinatown. They brought skills and know-how acquired in Hong Kong’s industrial society to “develop” the Chinese community in America. By the mid-1970s, New York’s Chinatown had grown into a thriving economic entity that promised to become a little “Hong Kong.” It never happened. The capital influx from Hong Kong was diverted into speculative investment which undermined the very prosperity it had earlier created. Without increased productivity, profits were maintained through raw exploitation. Workers labored under sweatshop conditions for long hours, for low wages, and without benefits. Although New York’s Chinatown continues to attract immigrants, it has now become the dumping ground for the desperate undocumented. Fewer Hong Kong residents are coming now as the opportunities for upward mobility that the Chinatown community once offered to the new immigrants have disappeared. The influence of Hong Kong may now be more as a facilitator of undocumented migration from China rather than as a source of migration. Hong Kong-based criminal societies play a major organizational role in the current wave of undocumented migration from southern China to the United States, and mainly New York.
