Inside Asian Gaming

June 2010 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 33 T here’s a good chance that from the beginning of July this year, Vietnamese will need to obtain a visa prior to travel in order to enter Macau. It may not matter much to the high net worth nationals of Vietnam, as they are likely also to have access to foreign passports from places such as the United States. Retrospectively imposing entry restrictions on nationals that were previously issued with visas on arrival does, though, arguably send out a mixed and potentially confusing message about Macau to the outside world. Not very long ago, João Manuel Costa Antunes, director of the Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO), was positively encouraging Vietnamese nationals to come to Macau as tourists. That was shortly after casino revenue declined for the first time since 2005 following the double whammy of the world financial crisis, which came to a head in September 2008, and the Chinese central government’s imposition of escalating restrictions on the length and frequency of visits to Macau by its citizens, with visits by residents of neighbouring Guangdong province limited to once every three months in October 2008. Open door “Vietnam is a large, very interesting market,” Mr Antunes said in January 2009 during a presentation to the tourism industry and media on how Macau would seek to tap new markets in response to the revenue slow down. By lateMay this year, however,VongChun Fat, the head of the Office of the Secretary for Security, announced a proposal to terminate the issuance of visas on arrival to visitors from Vietnam, along with those from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Macau authorities may also require arriving tourists from these countries to present return or onward tickets and proof of their financial resources. “We hope this measure can come into effect in the second half of this year,” stated Mr Vong. The justification for the measure is that visitors from these source markets are statistically more likely to overstay tourism visas issued on arrival, and/ or work illegally in Macau. That may be true. It’s difficult for those outside government to prove or disprove, as the Macau authorities don’t release a precise breakdown of the nationality of visa overstayers. And the number of Vietnamese tourists visiting Macau in the previous few quarters is relatively so small that it doesn’t even warrant a separate entry in the data produced by the territory’s Statistics and Census Service (DSEC). It follows, therefore, Macau Policy Macau’s appointed leaders seem especially sensitive to populist fears on immigration