According to the Secretary of the municipal Party Committee, around 1 million temporary residents in Hanoi would become its official resident if the current conditions are removed. Thus, the city’s budget and socio-economic infrastructure would be pressured. The draft amended Law on Residence since 2019 has suggested the removal of requirements for permanent residency in Hanoi, while at the mean time, a temporary resident needs to live in Hanoi for two to three years to be eligible to register as a permanent resident.
Mr. Secretary suggested that since the amount of recurrent budget allocated to a city is dependent on the size of its population, the increase in permanent residents would lead to the rise of the recurrent budget spending as well. Therefore, drafters when making amendments need to take this into account. While streamlining administrative procedures is also effective in ensuring the people’s right of residency and avoid red tape, urban migration should also be controlled.
The current draft amended Law on Residence is expected to remove the permanent residence booklet, “so ho khau”, and replace it with a personal identification number. The booklet has existed since 1960 and has been used as an instrument of public security, economic planning and population management. This idea dates back to 2018, when the Government passed Resolution 112 of the Ministry of Public Security on abolishing the procedures for household registration books and identity cards in residential management to unify the management by personal identification codes.
However, people are now criticising the decades-old management method as backward and aggravate red tape by tying one’s life and career prospects to a city or province. It also creates an unhealthy demand for people to try and relocate to Vietnam’s two biggest cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, in hope to secure a permanent residence there. This is because, through observation, several people with permanent residency status in small provinces face difficulties when applying in a certain educational institution, a visa to study abroad or a job vacancy.
Here at LLVN, we civil workers strongly believe that the government will soon come up with a better solution, a more modern instrument to adapt with the developing trend.
Updated by: Skylar Bui