**1. Introduction**

The measurement of city development is multidimensional, and area, population and economic volume are often regarded as its most important indicators. Macau has shown its uniqueness in all these aspects. Around two-thirds of Macau's land was reclaimed from the sea and over half of its current population consists of immigrants or migrant workers [1]. Although its immigration policies have been gradually tightened in the recent decades, Macau's population density still fluctuates up to around 20,000 people per square kilometer, making it one of the most crowded regions in the world. On its 32.9 km<sup>2</sup> land, Macau has created an economic miracle and established the "Las Vegas of Asia", with its gross gaming revenue surpassing Las Vegas in 2006 and per capita GDP reaching the second place in the world in 2019 [2,3].

Due to the extreme scarcity of land and the decline of traditional competitive industries, Macau has chosen to focus on developing its gaming–tourism industry in recent decades [4]. The Macau government auctions off six gaming business licenses to large companies, developing a gaming–tourism industry in which over half of the employees are non-local workers and consumers are tourists. Such an economic model shares similarities with convention and exhibition economy: low cost, high flexibility and high output multipliers [5]. However, Macau's booming gaming industry has significantly more negative social outcomes and has suppressed the development of other industries [4,6]. With gaming–tourism industry as its only pillar, Macau's economy became strongly dependent on the external environment and lacks economic resilience [7]. The grand casino hotels

**Citation:** Zhou, B.; Jiang, L. Unsustainable Urban Development Based on Temporary Workers: A Study on the Changes of Immigration in Macau between 1992 and 2019. *Land* **2022**, *11*, 1985. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/land11111985

Academic Editor: Li Ma, Yingnan Zhang, Muye Gan, Zhengying Shan

Received: 16 October 2022 Accepted: 4 November 2022 Published: 5 November 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

occupying a huge area have also suppressed housing construction in Macau [8], which makes it difficult for Macau to accommodate new immigrants.

Despite the great contribution of migrant workers to Macau's urban development, Macau's migration policies have been rather controversial in view of its dependence on temporary workers and strict regulation on status changing from non-immigrant to immigrant. Since the enforcement of Law 3/2005 and adjustment on temporary residence system for investors, administrators and technicians, Macau has only approved 2084 applications for residence of qualified technicians [9]. Therefore, the chance for 0.2 million migrant workers in Macau to become settlers through talent programs is extremely trivial. Studies find that Macau's policies on recruitment of non-local talent have no details and their implementation lacks transparency [10,11]. Moreover, the development of the gaming– tourism industry relies heavily on migrant workers with low salary and low social security. Consequently, Macau's dependence on the gaming industry makes it difficult to change current migration policies and hence reverse the problem of talent shortage [12].

Based on the statistical yearbook and census reports from the Macau Statistics and Census Service, this paper examines the influential factors of two types of migration in Macau and discusses how Macau's current policies on migrant workers and immigrants might hinder its sustainable development. The current study not only helps understand Macau's immigration-driven urban development process, but also provides reference for future studies on the development trend of other cities. Immigration-driven population growth is becoming more and more common around the world. For instance, the population growth of San Francisco, New York, and Tokyo bay areas in the last decade has mainly depended on immigration [13]. Macau has historically been built up and developed by immigrants [14], hence findings on Macau's trend of immigration and its consequences can be applicable to many other research sites as well.

In the following section, this paper reviews the relationship between immigration and the population, land and economic development process of Macau. Then we explain how the Error Correction Model (ECM) is applied to analyze the main influential factors on Macau's number of immigrants and migrant workers between 1992 and 2019. A section on the findings from data analyses follows. Finally, we discuss and conclude how the case of Macau can deepen our understanding of immigration-driven urban development, the impact of immigration on small economies, and the man–land relationship in landscarce cities.

#### **2. Background**

#### *2.1. Immigrants and Migrant Workers*

Migration is one of the most fundamental sources of demographic change. In the 19th century, Ravenstein already proposed some general laws on population migration [15]. As the scale, frequency and distance of migration continue to rise, the theoretical explanations for the occurrence of migration also continue to evolve. Push–pull theory points out that there are all sorts of positive and negative factors (related to the economy, environment, population structure, etc.) in the sending and receiving regions which influence the migration decision of potential migrants, but potential migrants also need to overcome the obstacle factors in-between [16]. Neo-classical migration theory uses economic equilibrium to explain population mobility [17,18]. It suggests that on the one hand, the relative labor shortage among regions is the main driving force of migration, while on the other hand, migration will lead to more balanced labor demand between the sending and receiving regions. According to new economics of labor migration, migrations in developing countries need to be understood from the perspective of families rather than individuals, and that individual migration is more often a way to minimize family risk than to maximize personal benefits [19,20]. An aspiration–(cap)ability framework encourages researchers to pay attention to both individual's willingness and capability to migrate, and suggests that migration actually occurs when these two aspects match with each other [21–23]. The combination of this framework on micro level migration on the one hand, and regional development

at the macro level on the other, can further form an interaction theory of migration and development that helps explain the scale of regional immigration and emigration [24].

Transnational migrant workers, whose settlement opportunities are severely restricted, have proliferated in recent decades as national controls have tightened. After World War II, due to the lack of labor, many Western European countries adopted the Guest Worker system to import laborers in batches from other countries through national agreements, resulting in matching problems and immigration problems [25]. In modern times, especially in the industrializing countries, the import mode of foreign low-skilled labor has been changed to the short-term contract labor system, which is characterized by the regulation of import methods by the state and the importing of foreign workers organized by enterprises [26]. This kind of cross-country labor migration with a clear path is often called the "point-to-point" globalization in immigration research. Studies on transnational corporations in Africa point out that "point-to-point" globalization allows companies to establish relatively independent production departments away from local societies, thus maintaining "social thinness" and smoothness of transnational capital [27]. Many East Asian countries are important exporters of migrant workers. For instance, Indonesia exported 700,000 regulated workers in 2007 [28], China sent overseas a total of 800,000 contract workers in 2011 [29], and the cross-border workers from Vietnam to China alone exceeded 200,000 in 2018 [30]. Research based on migrant workers in East Asia shows that with the stricter supervision of the state and the embedding of labor intermediary services between the sending and receiving countries, conditions of individualized labor transplanting has been clearly improved [29,31].

In recent decades, as the attention of migration scholars has been dispersed by the diversity of population migration, studies are shifting from inducing big-picture migration theory to conceptualizing the lives, identities and experiences of migrants from an insider's perspective [32]. This change of focus caused by the complexity of research objects has hindered the progress of migration-related theory development [33]. We believe that Macau's large population of immigrants and migrant workers makes it a strong candidate site to encourage and promote the development of migration theory. Macau used to absorb a large number of immigrants and multi-ethnic immigrants who integrated well into its diversified business-port culture [34]. However, as we will introduce in the following two sections, Macau has now become increasingly dependent on migrant workers due to the limitation of land and its economic development strategy, which in turn leads to a reduced immigration quota and a lower chance for non-local talents to settle.

#### *2.2. Immigrant-Driven Population Growth*

Historically speaking, Macau is a city built and fueled up by immigrants. The population record of the Ming Dynasty shows that there were only 400 residents in Macau in the year 1555 [14]. In 1563, Macau's population grew to over 5000, among which there were 900 Portuguese merchants. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, Macau had become a center harbor in east Asia, with mature trade routes starting from there to Japan, Mexico and Portugal. In 1640, the population of Macau reached a peak of 40,000, but than merchants left due to the sea ban in the early and mid-Qing Dynasty, and Macau's population shrank sharply to under 4000. In the late Qing Dynasty, China's foreign trade resumed and Macau became one of the starting points of the Chinese coolie trade. In addition, the Portuguese government occupied the Chinese territory of Macau, and brought the original residents under its jurisdiction. Under its comprehensive influence, the total population of Macau reached 75,000 in 1910. In the 1940s, Macau, being a relatively safe place, had attracted a large number of refugees from Chinese mainland, and its population temporarily surged to 0.25 million, but most refugees moved back to their hometown after the Second Sino-Japanese War. Due to China's Reform and Opening-up policy, the number of immigrants from the mainland to Macau has increased rapidly since the 1980s, boosting Macau's total population to 0.68 million within four decades [1].

In the 1970s, the garment export industry became the pillar industry of Macau [35,36]. Local laborers only met 50 to 70 percent of export orders, so factories in Macau hired large numbers of skilled textile workers from the adjacent Pearl River Delta region. During that period, the Macau government had no legislative regulations on labor migration. Through the two greatest amnesties in 1982 and 1990, around 60 thousand undocumented immigrants became local residents of Macau [37]. Research shows that these relatively young immigrants from the mainland alleviated Macau's low fertility problems to some extent, and postponed aging problems [38,39].

In 1988, Dispatch 12/GM/88 permitted Macau's enterprises to hire unskilled migrant workers legally, but for these temporary workers, the chance of becoming local residents was insignificant. Through enforcement of Order 2/90/M, Order 55/95/M, Law 4/2003 and Law 16/2021, the Macau government gradually distinguished between different purposes of entry and tightened up the granting of the right of abode [40]. In Macau's current official documents, migrant workers are recorded as non-resident workers, while immigrants are recorded as new arrivals from mainland China with a one-way permit (i.e., immigrants through the family reunion program) or individuals granted the right of abode (i.e., immigrants through other programs). Both types of immigrants are granted permanent residency after residing in Macau for over seven years, while non-resident workers do not have such rights. Highly skilled migrant workers can apply for immigration through the employer sponsored category, yet this quota is extremely limited in Macau [9]. At the end of 2019, migrant workers and immigrants who had arrived after the mid-1980s accounted for 26% and 27% of the Macau population, respectively; thus, around half of the city's population consists of recent arrivals [1].
