§ Mr. Hammersleyasked the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether he will state the number of persons of alien origin who have immigrated to the Colonies during the past five years?
Mr. M. MacDonaldThe statistics available are not on a sufficiently uniform basis for any exact figure to be given. There is, for instance, no figure for Chinese entering Hong Kong, and it seems likely that some of the figures for the African territories relate only to non-Africans. In the last five years there have been about 380,000 Chinese immigrants into Malaya, and 80,000 into North Borneo. Some 158,000 immigrants (including some British subjects) mostly of Jewish origin, have entered Palestine. The recorded figures for the rest of the Colonial Empire show a total of some 50,000 immigrants, of whom about 50 per cent. were of European origin.