In Pursuit of Safe Passport : Immigration: Offers of jobs and residency in other countries are luring thousands of people a year away from Hong Kong.

Qantas, the Australian airline, swooped down one day last summer with a team of recruiters and an immigration officer. By the time they left, they had signed up about 150 mechanics from the company that services planes at the Hong Kong airport by dangling residency permits and a possible Australian passport as bait.

Recently, the head of radiation therapy at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto stopped to interview radiation specialists. Six of them, in scarce supply all over the world, responded to the recruiting drive. Two were hired and the other four are under consideration by the hospital.

“This kind of targeted poaching is a problem,” admitted M. J. T. Rowse, the Hong Kong official who keeps statistics on emigration.

Simon Murray, the boss, or taipan, of one of Hong Kong’s major businesses, Hutchinson Whampos Ltd., considers the brain drain of professionals one of the colony’s most pressing problems. Of 480 middle managers in his business, he figures that more than half are actively trying to leave.

“Theoretically, I could lose them all in one afternoon. That’s very worrying,” said Murray.

Hand in hand with recruiters seeking skilled workers has been the rush of real estate developers seeking willing customers.

More than 300 people were told by a European real estate company in September how to get a Portuguese passport in six years by buying a $64,000 house in that country. Even better, the real estate promoters said, there was no need to live in Portugal; just have a lawyer renew the visa every year for the six years. In addition, they said holders of Portuguese passports will be able to settle anywhere in Western Europe once the 12-nation European Community erases borders in 1992.

Many residents don’t want to move from Hong Kong yet. They enjoy the life style and the fast pace of money making, where investors often can get back their stakes in one to two years, compared to seven to 10 in the United States.

What residents want is a passport that will let them leave at will, and often that requires settling elsewhere--at least for a while. There are signs that many return to do business here once they set themselves up elsewhere, and, as an antidote to the brain drain, Hong Kong is making it easier for them to return.

The exodus has been going on since 1985, when Britain and China agreed to the transfer. But the rush to get out accelerated two years ago, as the time of the turnover drew closer and the reality dawned that Britain would not allow residency to most Hong Kong Chinese holding British passports.

Government statistics, widely believed to understate the number leaving, estimate that 30,000 people emigrated in 1987. The number jumped to 45,800 last year and is expected to soar to about 60,000 in the 1990s as a result of fears raised by China’s brutal repression in June of student dissidents in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square.

The only limit on the numbers appears to be the inability of Hong Kong residents to get visas for the three favorite destinations--Australia, Canada and the United States.

“Think of it as insurance. People are making provisions for the worst-case scenario, which may not occur. But in people’s perceptions, such a scenario is not impossible, and they think it would be prudent to make provisions for it,” said K. Y. Tang, a senior civil servant.

Many of those leaving are the best and the brightest among the managers and professionals who make Hong Kong an Asian center of money making, banking and manufacturing. That loss is causing far greater damage to the Hong Kong economy than the money the people are taking with them.

“Professionals and managers make up nearly a quarter of all those leaving. They are precisely the kind of people Hong Kong can least afford to lose,” said Sir David Ford, the colony’s chief secretary.

While Hong Kong tries to combat the out-migration of its elite professional class, other countries are moving to capitalize not only on the colony’s well-trained labor, but also on its accumulation of wealth.

Ireland, for instance, took out a quarter-page advertisement in local newspapers headlined, “Residency and Investment in Ireland.” The ad announced the visit here earlier this month of senior executives of Ireland’s Industrial Development Department, who were offering residency permits in return for investments.

Nearby Singapore, suffering from a brain drain of its own, is trying to lure as many as 100,000 skilled Hong Kong Chinese to settle there. Businesses there such as the American-owned Seagate Technology, the largest private employer in Singapore, are looking to hire technically trained and highly educated Hong Kong residents.

Hong Kong already is the leading source of immigrants for Canada, with 23,000 settling there last year. The price of a residency permit is a $200,000 investment.

Over the past two years, the Hong Kong office of Canada’s Imperial Bank of Commerce has picked up $28.4 million in investments from 133 people shifting their residence.

Real-estate agents here estimated that Hong Kong investors have bought $17 billion in Canadian property over the past four years. “They have no trouble flipping down $4 million for a house because in Hong Kong it would cost $20 million,” the Associated Press quoted Ontario Premier David Peterson as saying last year. To underscore that view, Stanley Ho, one of Asia’s richest men, paid $44.4 million for a 25-room mansion on Toronto’s millionaire’s row, Bridle Path.

Hong Kong is trying to fight back. The government is upgrading its educational system to train more replacements and easing its own immigration laws to gain foreign workers. To build confidence among its people, the government is urging Britain to offer the right to live there to a large pool of people in occupations most likely to be lured elsewhere.

Although the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has not announced any number yet, speculation in Hong Kong puts it at about 150,000 with as many as half the spots going to ranking civil servants and police officials. That will be a drop in the bucket, compared to the 3.2 million British passport holders in Hong Kong.