On discrimination and the status of immigrants in the Hong Kong labour market

This paper studies the extent of discrimination against mainland Chinese immigrants in the Hong Kong labour market and provides a quantitative assessment of the source of wage differentials between local born Hong Kong residents and Chinese immigrants. Using the 2001 Hong Kong Population Census data, we find strong evidence of a wage gap between locals and post-1980 Chinese immigrants. There is also clear evidence that discrimination accounts for a substantial proportion of the wage gap between the two groups. Furthermore, our findings suggest that while the overall wage gap may shrink with the immigrants' duration of residence in Hong Kong, the percentage of the wage gap due to discrimination does not change very much after the immediate post-immigration period.