Asylum Seeking and the Global City

Francesco Vecchio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135107666
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Asylum seeking and the global city are two major contemporary subjects of analysis to emerge both in the literature and in public and official discourses on human rights, urban socioeconomic change and national security. Based on extensive, original ethnographic research, this book examines the situation of asylum seekers in Hong Kong and offers a narrative of their experiences related to internal and external borders, the performance of border crossing and asylum politics in the context of the global city.

Hong Kong is a city with no comprehensive legislation covering refugee claims and official and public opinion is dominated by the view that the city would be flooded with illegal economic migrants were policy changes to be implemented. This book considers why Hong Kong has become a destination for asylum seekers, how asylum seekers integrate into local and global economic markets and why the illegalization of asylum seekers plays a significant role in the processes of global city formation.

This book will be essential reading for academics and students involved in the study of migration; globalization and borders; research methods in criminology; social problems and urban sociology.

1
The global city and asylum seeking

The Introduction identified Jacobsen’s (2006) livelihood framework as a useful theoretical tool to advance critical understandings of how urban refugee populations manage their lives against a backdrop of policies, laws and social norms that impact refugee agency to produce specific outcomes. In this chapter, I develop this framework by including perspectives from the global city paradigm, which offers an equally constructive tool to gain in-depth understanding of the vulnerability of asylum seekers, and hence their agency and the outcomes of their migration, in the context of Hong Kong.

The Introduction explained that the aim of this research was to provide attentive descriptions and analyses of the lived experiences of the asylum seekers who arrive in this global city so as to comprehend the deviancy that official and public views generally attribute to people alleged to travel to Hong Kong for the purpose of exploiting asylum mechanisms and unlawfully engaging in economic activities. Under this proposition, the vulnerability of asylum seekers is generated by a conceptualization of asylum that is evinced by the socioeconomic role that asylum seekers play in this city, one that is strongly intertwined with the notion of asylum abuse. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to frame asylum by a set of findings from the literature the relevance of which may at first appear tenuous. Nonetheless, refugee mobility and experiences appear to be largely defined by global economic forces and neoliberal institutional structures that define the global city’s tendency to generate demand for labour in the expanding urban low-grade and underpaid economy. As noted in the Introduction, part of this economy is reliant on (irregular) migrant workers (Sassen 2001), and asylum seekers constitute a labour reserve prepared to engage with the economic activities typical of the new urban economy. This is not to say that no differences exist between asylum seekers and labour migrants, but in the context of Hong Kong, the two categories largely overlap, often not because of any rational choice on the part of asylum seekers, but because the boundaries that usually divide the two groups are blurred in this city.

An analysis of this specific context is thus believed to provide meaningful perspectives to situate the experiences of asylum seekers and critically evaluate the claims of asylum abuse. Such claims are in fact a constant thread that knits together the many arguments presented in the chapters that follow, for these claims impact the background that determines the availability, mix and extent of the resources asylum seekers can access; the strategies they use to access them; and the goals they can feasibly achieve. In this light, this chapter reveals that the notion of asylum abuse is rooted in dynamics that extend beyond the fear that asylum seekers lie for their own benefit. Instead, this notion appears to be based in socioeconomic and political processes that are strictly interwoven with Hong Kong’s emergence as a renowned global city.

The chapter is divided into three sections, each dealing with interrelated aspects primarily intended to investigate the socioeconomic transformation that has occurred in Hong Kong in terms of social polarization and the division of labour. In particular, the opportunity structure affecting asylum seekers is discussed in light of global economic restructuring and local governance, which determine the spaces within which local residents can generate income. Hong Kong is thus analyzed in connection to its local and historical context, including previous compelling migratory inflows which have shaped the overall development of policies around perceptions of refugees. In this regard, the interconnectedness and at times contradictory relation between the ‘global’ and the several levels of the ‘local’ are found here to be critical in defining current experiences of asylum in Hong Kong.

Accounting for the opportunity structure: The global city

When the British declared sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1841, the ‘fragrant harbour’ – as it was then translated into English – consisted of a few sparsely populated fishing villages. Today, after 156 years of colonial rule, and almost two decades of socialist control brought about by the transfer of sovereignty from the UK to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, Hong Kong has grown to occupy the role of a global metropolis, connected to other privileged cities and pivotal to the growth of the global economy (Meyer 2000; Chu 2008). As part of a powerful and interdependent network of global cities operating at a vast geographical scale that comprises leading financial centres such as New York, London and Tokyo (Friedmann 1986; Sassen 2001), Hong Kong has become a key location for the regional and international coordination, exchange and consumption of capital and highly specialized services, at the gateway to China’s interior and bustling economy (Meyer 2000). However, Hong Kong not only functions as a centre and meeting place for high-level financial activities and an intermediary between the second-largest national economy and the globalized world. It is also a site of structural social transformation, much of which appears to be consistent with descriptions of the ‘global city’ in terms of social inequality, consumption patterns and the casualization of labour (Sassen 1998, 2001).

Globalization scholars generally note that, since the 1970s, the world has changed as capital was released from its national constraints and capitalism progressively advanced to reach virtually every nation in the world. We live in a time in which highly mobile capital and financial markets appear to have assumed dominance over industrial and agricultural production (Coleman and Sajed 2013). At the same time, economic neoliberal principles based on the postulation that economic growth and human well-being are better enhanced via the liberalization of the economy have become predominant in the corridors of power of both national governments and the supranational institutions that regulate global trade and finance (Harvey 2005). This change, according to several scholars, has resulted in the rescaling of the strategic territories that articulate the global economy (Brenner 1999; Sassen 2001). Simply put, the state’s capacity to control the economy has weakened, and a clearly observable tendency has emerged of the general retreat of the nation-state from economic governance. This development has created new opportunities for other scales to emerge, and global cities have become one site that has benefited from this worldwide shift (Sassen 2001, 2005). Global cities are complex constructs, the major defining feature of which is that they possess the specialized producer services that corporate firms need in order to control and articulate their increasingly dispersed global operations. In other words, in an era of ‘time and space compression’ (Harvey 2005; Falk 1999), whereby capital moves faster and distances are increasingly of less importance due to innovations in information and transportation technologies (Castells 2000), corporate operations are more complex and divided across multiple sites. Further, given the intensive and increasing global competition, corporations no longer control every process of the production chain. Rather, they outsource many of their functions, including those that are contracted to firms that specialize in accounting, finance, legal and other services, which tend to cluster in particular cities due to both the nature of their business dealings and the ease of networking with their counterparts around the globe (Sassen 2001; Venables 2001).

Global cities have thus become vital as nodal intersections in the articulation and control of global economic flows. Yet this function – while contested by some scholars (Smith 2013) – is performed by people and requires appropriate infrastructures to operate. In effect, the abstractness of capital mobility finds its counterpart in the materiality of the city (Acuto 2011). Ever more numerous are the office towers located in city centres, which provide the space for the economic activities of our time. Likewise, increasingly numerous are the hotels and serviced apartments that compete for prime locations in urban areas. State-of-the-art airports, railways and digital highways are built in record time and are continuously renovated and expanded to accommodate the growing demand for transnational services. Noteworthy is that the changing urban landscape of the global city is not aimed solely at building an environment purposefully supportive of the global economy. Rather, it is also intended to market an image of the city that is strictly intertwined with its material (re)development (Zukin 1992). Just as corporations compete with each other to minimize operational costs and gain larger market shares, so do global cities compete with each other to retain and enhance their centrality in the new complex and integrated global system (Ancien 2011; Robinson 2002). Luxurious lifestyles in cosmopolitan and dynamic environments possessed of all comforts and amenities supposedly nurture an appearance of vitality conducive to human resources, foreign investments and tourism. Ever higher buildings reshape the skyline and the hierarchical geography of successful cities, while the organization of mega-events and sparkly fireworks displays instil confidence in the city. In this view, global cities become sites of new cultural forms of spending which underscore both the homogenization and universalization of consumption patterns now based on affluence, emulation and materialism (Levine 2007). Critically, one key contention of the global city paradigm is that the rise of these new forms of consumption produces a chain of dynamics which engender vast and growing polarization in the occupational, income and spatial distribution between classes (Sassen 2001).

To draw a parallel with Hong Kong, there is no doubt that the former British colony has developed to resemble a global city. Central to Hong Kong’s economic structures are the processes that reshape capital and power relations in terms of financial markets, producer services and telecommunication technologies (Meyer 2000; Jao 1997; Chiu and Lui 2009). The impressive boom in financial activities that occurred following World War II has been extensively documented (Jao 1997; Schenk 2001).The socio-spatial dynamics of urban economic change have also been analyzed, emphasizing a link between wealth disparities and urban spatial segregation (Forrest et al. 2004; Lee et al. 2007). In this light, some scholars highlight that Hong Kong is an ideal place for examining social dynamics in an era of globalization, as the city has ‘undergone the critical transformation postulated in the global city literature in the most striking manner’ (Chiu and Lui 2009: 82). Indeed, the transformation that has taken place in Hong Kong has as much to do with the large-scale financial activities and the ‘glittering lights’ of much of the recent urban redevelopment as it does with an apparent divide between the haves and have-nots, and the related inequality to which an increasingly demanding class of well-off professionals contributes.

Framing the ‘dual’ city

The labour requirements of corporations have been argued to give rise in global cities to a workforce possessed of high levels of training and specialization (Fried-mann 1986; Sassen 2001). Citing population census micro-data, Chiu and Lui (2009) find that the number of managers and professionals in Hong Kong has grown by 40.3 per cent and 81 per cent, respectively, in a relatively short span of time, from 1991 to 2001 – an increase that brought the two categories to account for about 15 per cent of the employed population, which rose to 20 per cent in 2012 (Hong Kong Government 2013a). A similar upward trend is evinced in the number of transnational elites who have taken residence in the city (Chiu and Lui 2009). Hong Kong’s emergence as a leading financial centre has indeed changed the social strata and the composition of the labour force, and Findlay et al. (1996) and Li et al. (1998) note that this has occurred at a time when the size of the expatriate community has grown despite the return of Hong Kong to China and the departure of numbers of British nationals previously employed in the colonial government. According to Findlay et al. (1996), the rise and diversification of the ‘expat’ community suggests that the employment opportunities for highly skilled foreign-born individuals have flourished within the new economy of an expanding global city. Partly confirming this trend, the Hong Kong Immigration Department (ImmD) has stated that 28,625 non-Chinese professionals from nearly 100 countries were admitted into Hong Kong for employment in 2012 (ImmD 2013), adding to the 30,557 and 22,280 professionals admitted for the same reason in 2011 and 2010, respectively (ImmD 2011, 2012).

Although the size of this population is a small fraction of a population of 7.1 million people, the expansion of a well-educated and presumably highly paid class of individuals favoured by substantial gains in real income and wealth has to a large extent mirrored changes in consumer behaviour (Chan 2000). Luxury items, stylish brands, foreign cuisine and costly apartments in brand new high-rise buildings, conveniently located a short distance from the financial heart of the city, have in recent years come to symbolize the new vision of a ‘good life’. All over the territory, modern shopping malls have popped up like crystal mushrooms to offer the latest styles in fashion design and interior decor, presenting to the local resident population and visitors alike an image of the city as the ultimate Asian shopping paradise (McDonogh and Wong 2005). At the same time, elegant apartment towers featuring swimming pools, gyms and high-tech gadgets, often named in hard-to-pronounce but romantic, exotic-sounding European languages, have come to challenge the usual space-poor, noisy, crowded surroundings of the city by evoking idealized representations of a vibrant, exciting experience in sophisticated milieus.

Additionally, Hong Kong boasts a capacity of 1000 daily flights networking the city with over 180 destinations worldwide, generating a passenger turnout of 56 million in 2012.¹ Hong Kong’s service sector generates over 90 per cent of the territory’s gross domestic product (GDP) (Lung 2012), while tourism has skyrocketed in terms of occupational opportunities in recent decades (Lee et al. 2007) and has become one of the city’s four pillar industries, together with financial services, trading and logistics and professional and producer services (Census and Statistics Department [CSD] 2013). Adding to the global dimension of this city, the Hong Kong International Airport and the harbour located at the end of the Pearl River Delta are among the world’s busiest cargo and containerized manufactured products gateways, offering multiple linkages between China and the world. As global cities assume different roles in the global economy, the fortunes of Hong Kong pivot around its gateway function, which has earned the city a privileged position on a par with New York and London for high-connectivity capacity (Chubarov and Brooker 2013). It is this connectivity that is of outmost importance in attracting large cohorts of tourists and professionals to Hong Kong (cf. Beaverstock et al. 2000; Iredale 2000). Infrastructure and new construction sites open regularly across town, and gentrification has become an inevitable part of life in a place where extensive urban development is impossible for the territory’s limited size and the tendency is to replace residential property every 50 years, or increasingly sooner to suit new trends and redevelopers’ desires for profit (Ley and Teo 2013).

In terms of occupation, the global city paradigm contends that the existence of these high-income lifestyles has fed the expansion of an array of elementary occupations in low-grade and labour-intensive sectors, poorly paid but necessary for the construction and maintenance of residential and commercial buildings, hotels and restaurants, and for the day-to-day caretaking of household activities. Importantly, this change has occurred at a time when manufacturing has receded from the major urban centres of advanced economies. Over the past three decades, a substantial volume of scholarship has highlighted the link between capitalism and the spatial redi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The global city and asylum seeking
• 2 Global phenomena and local responses
• 3 Crossing borders into Hong Kong
• 4 Establishing life at the destination
• 5 Asylum seeker engagement with the informal economy
• 6 (Un)wanted people in the global city
• Index