The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported that hundreds of people, including many Bangladeshis, were being smuggled into Hong Kong from staging posts on mainland China.
The Bangladesh mission in Hong Kong said they had not been contacted by Hong Kong authorities about this.
“We did not receive any report from the police, immigration services or anyone else in the Hong Kong government,” Consul Mirana Mahrukh told the Dhaka Tribune over the telephone yesterday.
She said alongside the nationals of India, Nepal and Pakistan, a few Bangladeshis had been known to enter the territory illegally.
“But we are not aware of a surge in the number of Bangladeshis illegally entering Hong Kong,” she said.
The secretary of the expatriates’ welfare and overseas employment ministry, Khondaker Shawkat Hossain, said, “We have just heard the news and we are verifying it.”
Home ministry officials were not available for comment.
A large-scale people-smuggling operation that uses Shenzhen as a staging post has seen hundreds of illegal immigrants enter Hong Kong by boat in the past year, the Sunday
Morning Post published online yesterday in a follow-up to a report published the day before in the South China Morning Post.
The migrants, most of them from Bangladesh or Pakistan, flew into cities across mainland China and headed to Shenzhen, where they paid middlemen HK$10,000 to HK$12,000 to take them to Hong Kong by high-speed sampan, according to a number of migrants and people with a knowledge of the racket.
The Shenzhen link emerged as figures revealed a 50 per cent year-on-year rise in the number of non-ethnic-Chinese illegal immigrants arrested in Hong Kong. The official police figures show the number rose from 291 in the first half of last year to 447 in the same period this year, the report said.
“This summer has seen a spike. It has been particularly busy,” said a police source, adding that the authorities were “very confident” they were catching all migrants after they landed on the west and south coasts of Lantau during the night.
Each boat typically carried 10 to 12 people, and usually land near Tai O or Fan Lau, allowing them to stay in mainland waters for most of the journey, the source said.
It was not clear how many of the illegal immigrants avoided arrest but those picked up were taken to a local police station, before being passed to an immigration centre in Tuen Mun where asylum claims are assessed.
Those without valid grounds to seek asylum are deported.
One Pakistani asylum seeker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had used lodgings in Shenzhen three times in the past decade to enter Hong Kong.
The police public relations bureau said they had noted an increase in illegal immigration in the first half of this year.
Kamal, a Bangladeshi living in Hong Kong, said the use of Shenzhen as a staging post for illegal entry to Hong Kong had grown in popularity in the past decade as visa restrictions for South Asians were tightened. Visa-free access for Bangladeshi nationals was withdrawn in 2006.
“Please stop them coming. It’s ridiculous and horrible,” said Kamal, who has seen a number of compatriots trapped in seemingly endless cycles of incarceration after their arrival in Hong Kong.
The surge in migrants from South Asia is just the latest development in Hong Kong’s long history of illegal immigration.
After the end of the civil war on the mainland in 1949, an estimated one million people poured across the border, often using boats or even swimming. Although illegal, many were allowed to stay to help ease labour shortages.
Hong Kong again became a prime destination after the Vietnam war, with nearly 200,000 “boatpeople” entering the city between 1975 and 2000.
About two-thirds were eventually resettled in other countries, while the final third were repatriated.