Personal Inquiry: Tracing the Migration of Hongkongers to Britain

If you know me, I am a computer nerd who happens to like the space industry. Perhaps one day I would love to tell geospatial stories on Earth, Moon, Mars, and beyond.

To start somewhere, after searching for a topic to cover in my life, I want to start a blog series on tracing the migration of Hongkongers to the likely destinations such as Britain, Canada, Taiwan, United States, and Australia. Why Hong Kong? Having spent over a decade of my childhood there, Hong Kong holds a special place in my heart. I suppose I would call myself American-born Hongkonger to accurately describe my origin. Given my personal ties, amidst the ever changing social and geopolitics landscape, I have become increasingly curious about the number of people leaving Hong Kong.

I have been following along with the news to know that the British Nationals Oversears (BN(O)) route is likely the most common path for those leaving Hong Kong. To begin my analysis, I turn to the quarterly released statistics by the UK Home Office. According to the latest release from September 2023, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release, the numbers are quite revealing:

3.2 British Nationals Overseas (BN(O)) route
There have been a total of 191,000 applications for the BN(O) route since its introduction on 31 January 2021 up to the end of September 2023.**

A total of 154,078 out-of-country BN(O) visas have been granted with 135,400 arrivals in the UK under the scheme. The latest quarter alone saw 6,429 visas granted and 11,500 arrivals.

Additionally, 30,622 in-country BN(O) visas were granted during this period.

For my first analysis, I plan to gather and analyze these numbers by quarters starting with Britain, and then I would plot a simple trend line by countries. As I have all the numbers, I may also begin a county-by-county analysis. I would love to create some sort of geospatial heat map to visualize where people are. Eventually, I imagine I would pick up video creation skills (like Adobe After Effects) to wrap up with a video of sort.