The report's finding relates specifically to mainland residents who settle in the city with One-way Permits and are required to reside in Hong Kong for seven years to become eligible for permanent residency. These newcomers are classified as "Persons from the Mainland having resided in Hong Kong for less than 7 Years", or PMRs, by the Census and Statistics Department.

There were 171,322 PMRs in the city as of June 2011, down from 217,103 in 2006 and 266,577 in 2001. As the city's population continues to climb over the decade driven by newborn babies, the proportion of PMRs in Hong Kong's whole population has dropped from 4.1 percent in 2001 to 2.5 percent in 2011.

Sze Lai-shan, the community organizer who runs a new immigrants project at the Society for Community Organization, said since cross-border couples have been raising fewer children in recent years, the waiting list of young children for the One-way Permit has got shorter.

But she noted many others are still waiting because restriction for "over-age" children is still in place. Slow approval is also a stigma for divided families. "My estimate is that the number of applicants in the queue is more or less the same as a decade ago," she said.

The report also illustrated certain demographic characters of the mainland immigrants. Their median age (31.5) is considerably lower than that of the city's population (42.4). Their education attainment has improved over the decade, but they still tend to take up less skillful jobs.

Their monthly earnings have leaped from HK$6,000 in 2001 to HK$7,500 in 2011, but it is still below average. Sze added inflation over the past decade has offset the income gain on the books, and the mainland immigrants' quality of life has hardly improved.

(HK Edition 12/15/2012 page1)