Howard Husock

The 700-mile fence to be erected on the U.S.-Mexico border may or may not prove good election year politics for the Republican Party. But the border between capitalist Hong Kong and Communist China raises doubts as to whether a fence—albeit one to keep people out, not in—can co-exist with a free trade regime and whether the desire to exclude can, over time, lead to ugly political compromises.

There are few border-crossings in the world anything like the U.S.-Mexico border. But Lo Wu, a train station stop on the border dividing the de facto city state of Hong Kong from China’s Shenzen Special Economic Zone, must be considered one of them. The busiest of four Hong Kong-China border crossings (and, with 300,000 crossing each day, perhaps the busiest border crossing in the world), Lo Wu, like Tijuana, Brownsville or El Paso, is a place where the First and Third worlds meet. Hundreds of thousands of shoppers from Hong Kong cross the border daily in search of bargains in Shenzen, while a much smaller number of mainland Chinese visitors go in the other direction.

Were they allowed to do so, throngs of the Chinese poor would likely cross for reasons other than visiting Hong Kong’s Disneyworld. Wages in the Hong Kong “special administrative region” are three to five times or more higher than those even in relatively affluent coastal China, and far higher still than those in the country’s rural interior. There are other magnets, as well: in ironic contrast to Hobbesian Communist China, Hong Kong offers a European-style welfare state, with free government health care and extensive public housing.

For all these attractions, though, just 18 percent of the 450,000 mainlanders who cross each day into Hong Kong are going to work—and many of those who are going to work hold special skills. Working with the Beijing government, Hong Kong has accomplished what U.S. immigrant opponents dream of—ensured that almost no one without the legal right to do so lives or works there. But seeing what it takes might give pause to those who would seek to seal the U.S. border.

It has been nine years since the 1997 “handover” of the former British colony to mainland China, and the establishment of the so-called “one country, two systems” regime for the quasi-city state of seven million people. While the handover allowed Hong Kong to maintain its free press and its independent courts, one wishes that Britain had established universal suffrage and direct elections of a chief executive and legislature before departing.

Still, it’s an arrangement that allows Hong Kong's culture of liberty to thrive: in sharp contrast to Beijing, the internet is nowhere blocked here; instead, ubiquitous coffee bars provide free access for customers. International newspapers are not kept out—instead, the Asian Wall Street Journal is published here. Religion thrives: Catholic Bishop Joseph Zen regularly denounces the mainland regime for not permitting churches to operate without state permission; in Hong Kong’s Central district on Saturdays, schoolgirls in starched white uniforms solicit donations for causes such as the Christian Family Service Center. Falun Gong, the quasi-religious dissident group suppressed in China, demonstrates routinely here. And in contrast to the 1989 murders in Tianamen Square, mass demonstrations calling for universal suffrage occur regularly—one this July attracted 40,000 people on the anniversary of the transfer of the island to China.

Arriving in Hong Kong after visiting Beijing is, indeed, a profound relief.

The "handover" also included an arrangement between Hong Kong and Beijing designed both to keep the mainland Chinese out of Hong Kong and to keep Hong Kong-based critics of the Communist regime out of China. It’s a deal based in immigration-phobia: the profound concern of the Hong Kong government about being inundated by poor Chinese in search of better wages. To protect its lower-paid workers from even lower-cost competitors, and to protect its government health care and housing systems from increased demands, Hong Kong, famous for laissez-faire and liberty, has worked hand-in-glove with the authoritarian People’s Republic.

Here’s how the system works: All legal residents of and workers in Hong Kong must hold a personal identity card that includes not along with a photo encoded biometric information such as one’s thumb print. It’s printed with something called “optical variable ink” that changes color in light, to discourage forgeries—and which is more expensive per ounce that gold.

A trickle of permits is available for mainlanders to settle in Hong Kong, about 150 a day, almost all reserved for reunifying families with the many Chinese men who came to Hong Kong in the colonial era, leaving wives, children and elderly parents behind. But it is not Hong Kong which decides who gets such permits; it has bet that the best way to ensure that China will not open the floodgates and inundate Hong Kong with cheap labor is to let China control who is allowed to exit. Thus Chinese dissidents cannot look to Hong Kong as safe haven—they would have to get a permit to flee from the Chinese authorities themselves.

Nor would surreptitious means be likely to work. Thousands of mainlanders a year seek to enter Hong Kong illegally, obtaining visitors’ permits—to shop or visit family—from China but intending to stay in Hong Kong to seek work. Border control authorities turned back some 25,000 such persons last year; screening them out both through interrogation and through such technologies as “face recognition” software; those who are trying to use someone else’s identify—and who may have bribed Chinese officials to put a another’s name on their visitor’s permit—are found out that way. Hong Kong maintains a data base with the faces of some 100,000 who have tried to cross illegally before or who “over-stayed” and worked illegally after entering with a visitor’s permit. More than 10,000 such “over-stayers” were found living and working in Hong Kong last year and forcibly returned to China— comparable to the US send half a million illegal immigrants back to Mexico.

Even tourism from the mainland, although vastly expanded in recent years, is controlled. Again, because of Hong Kong’s concern about a cheap labor influx, the so-called “individual visitor permit” can only be obtained by Chinese citizens living in 38 cities chosen because of their relative affluence. It’s as if the U.S. were to say that Mexican citizens from wealthy Monterrey could visit, but not residents from the poorer south.

Securing the border to keep out those Chinese who would settle in Hong Kong has implications for the freedom of Hong Kong residents, as well. Those who live close to the Chinese border must carry an additional “close-in areas” resident card, developed to make sure mainlanders don’t settle clandestinely in border areas, as Mexicans do in the Rio Grande valley. In the other direction, Hong Kong residents entering the mainland must first receive a so-called “home visit permit” issued by the Chinese government, notwithstanding that Hong Kong is legally part of China.

The system is efficient: Hong Kongers going to shop in cheaper Shenzen can just swipe their smart cards and walk across the border. If they forget their cards, they can simply use their thumbprint. Hundreds of thousands cross each day, yet no one waits more than half an hour. US and Canadian officials might well look at such a set-up.

Crucially, however, the system lets Chinese officials keep out those they consider undesirable—Falun Gong members, investigative journalists, human rights advocates and even some elected members of Hong Kong’s relatively powerless Legislative Council cannot obtain a home visit permit. Beijing uses Hong Kong’s concern about an influx of cheap labor to effectively quarantine its democratic culture. Critics of the mainland regime are kept out; demonstrations in Hong Kong are not be reported in the Chinese press. Falun Gong and Christian missionaries alike are kept out.

To date, Hong Kong’s economy does not seem to have suffered because of such restrictions. Growth hovers around five percent, unemployment around four. But the city’s birth rate of .98 children per woman is well below replacement level and concern has begun to rise about how to sustain such services as its British-style health care system. Continued economic growth, though, depends in part on a special circumstance: Hong Kong may not admit poor Chinese but its port exports the goods they make in Shenzen and elsewhere. And Hong Kongers can cross the border at will to work in China, though mainland Chinese cannot do the reverse.

The border of the “special administrative region” has been secured, but at a high cost in liberty.

The analogy to Mexico is not perfect. But it’s worth keeping in mind that, were the US to gain cooperation from Mexico’s government in controlling emigration, it would require a high level of cooperation with that country’s notoriously corrupt and oligopolistic regime (conditions which, of course, help fuel emigration in the first place). Maverick Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman has characteristically gotten to the heart of this matter by suggesting that the U.S. simply pay a handful of Mexican generals to take care of the whole problem. That, indeed, is how so much else works in Mexico.

The point is this: The restriction on freedom that comes with shutting down border crossings.—even when the economic incentives to cross are powerful—restricts, as well, the chance for free nations to insist on freedom elsewhere. How much better had the President stuck to his guns and pushed on for his guest worker program—acknowledging economic reality—rather than acquiescing to a wall.

Howard Husock is the Vice President of Programs and the Director of the Manhattan Institute's Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. He was formerly the director of case studies in public policy and management at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.