Making Migration Work: The Roles of Commercial Actors in Hong Kong’s Outmigration

This article examines the roles of commercial agents in driving the wave of emigration from Hong Kong since 2019. Human outflows from Hong Kong in recent years have been supported by a booming migration industry involving property agents, education consultants, financial planners, and tax advisors—the “PEFTs”—whose activities and effects on migration processes have been underappreciated in public discourses. Drawing on interviews with PEFTs in Hong Kong, potential migrants and migrants who have moved to the United Kingdom, as well as field research on activities of the PEFTs, this article argues that the PEFTs, through the products, services, and advice they provide, have created new interest, discussions, and even anticipation and excitement about emigration in Hong Kong. This research has three main findings: first, the PEFTs assume the roles of promotors, facilitators, and problem solvers in migratory processes; second, the ways in which the PEFTs operate cannot be studied in isolation as they are linked to existing structural characteristics of the polity in which they operate; third, the PEFTs have helped create and sustain a migration environment in Hong Kong in which political forces account for only one of the many drivers of emigration.