Hong Kong will liberalize the immigration regime to make it easier for non-local graduates to stay and work in Hong Kong, a Hong Kong immigration official said Saturday.

There are many schemes to attract Chinese mainland and overseas talent to Hong Kong, said Helen Chan, assistant director of Immigration of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.

From the 2008-2009 school year, non-local graduates who have obtained a degree or higher qualification in a full-time program in Hong Kong, upon application to the Immigration Department, may be granted 12 months' stay without any condition and are free to take up any jobs, she said.

However, she said that the stringent assessment criteria for Quality Migrant Admission Scheme applicants remains in place, despite revisions in scheme details that allow Hong Kong to cast a wider net in its search for quality migrants.

The scheme was revised in mid-January to enable more mainland and overseas quality migrants to be short-listed for further assessment, particularly younger ones, in view of Hong Kong's aging population. But the scheme's annual quota of 1,000 entrants remains.

She said that before the revision, the scheme's advisory committee endorsed 71 percent of the short-listed applications it assessed. Although more applications were short-listed after the revision, the success rate fell.

Chan said 74 applications which were not qualified for further assessment before the revision have now been short-listed for the advisory committee's vetting.

Since the scheme's launch in mid-2006, the committee has handled 578 short-listed applications, with 398 endorsed. The success rate is 69 percent.

(Xinhua News Agency February 24, 2008)