Desperate People - illegal immigrants from China

0 Comments | Current Events, March 24, 2000

Each Year, Thousands of Chinese Risk Death to Enter the United States Illegally

SEATTLE -- On January 11, U.S. immigration officials in Seattle, acting on a tip, ripped open the canvas top of a 40-foot-long ship's cargo container. The container, which had been loaded on a ship in Hong Kong, had recently been offloaded at the Seattle docks after a three-week voyage across the Pacific.

Out of the container climbed 15 dazed and disoriented young Chinese men. The container itself reeked of human waste. To their horror, the immigration agents also found three bodies--men who had not survived the voyage. The survivors told a harrowing story of having paid smugglers up to $50,000 apiece for passage to the United States, only to find themselves confined in a closed container deep in the hold of a ship for three weeks on the high seas.

They lived in darkness, enduring often freezing temperatures. For food they had been given only small amounts of rice, crackers, and water. They had buckets for toilets, but no place to dump the buckets.

"[The men] were virtually entombed [in the container]," said Sharon Gavin, spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). "The people who died may have been dead anywhere from three to seven days, and you're stuck in the container with them. It's disgusting."

40,000 a Year

The 18 men weren't forced into the cargo container. They chose to pay money for a chance to enter the United States illegally. Their efforts only produced misery, death, and deportation back to China for the survivors. Although 203 Chinese were arrested in 1999 after trying to enter the United States illegally in cargo containers, thousands more escaped detection. The INS estimates that 40,000 Chinese, mainly young men, enter the United States illegally each year and disappear into big cities.

Since 1979, an estimated 1 million people have left China and headed for other parts of the world, mainly the United States. More than 100,000 more join this exodus each year. Most come from Fujian province, which lies along China's southeast coast. Fujian is an economically depressed area that has not fully shared in China's economic boom.

Often whole families, desperate for a better life, will pool their life savings for a partial payment to send a son or daughter across the sea. People travel to nearby port cities, mainly Hong Kong, where smugglers, known as "snakeheads," charge from $20,000 to $60,000 to smuggle them into the United States. The immigrants agree to pay part of the cost up front and the rest when they get U.S. jobs.

Some immigrants go directly to U.S. shores in ships that land them at night on deserted beaches. Others are smuggled into the United States by a variety of means, such as docking at a port in Mexico or Canada and slipping across the U.S. border. Once ashore, many illegal immigrants are put in safe houses and given jobs by accomplices of the snakeheads.

Why So Many Come

Why do so many Chinese want to come to the United States?

They hope to get rich. Snakeheads tell prospective customers that they can repay what money they owe the snakeheads for their passage over in only a few months. In reality, those who make it to the United States end up as indentured servants, bound by contracts to work in restaurants and garment sweatshops for such low wages that it takes them many years, not a few months, to repay the debts they owe the snakeheads. Since the immigrants are in the United States illegally, they can't be protected by U.S. laws that guarantee a minimum wage and safe working conditions. They are exploited and don't protest because they don't want to be deported.

While the immigrants remain poor, Chinese criminal organizations, such as the Triads, and sweatshop operators make huge profits. According to crime experts, criminal gangs now make more money smuggling people than they do selling drugs.

Under foreign pressure, the Chinese government is beginning to crack down on the trade. Last year, the government raised the penalty for those seeking to illegally leave China from 15 days in jail to as much as one year. Snakeheads can now get life in prison under Chinese law.

To help stem the tide, foreign officials are going straight to China to discourage illegal emigration. Australia's immigration minister, Paul Ruddock, visited Fujian last year and distributed 5,000 posters warning against dealing with smugglers. U.S. officials visited Fujian last month with videotapes showing immigrant arrests and conditions in cargo containers aboard ships.

"We want to make people understand that [illegal emigration] is dangerous, and if they do it, they are risking exploitation and a lifetime of indentured servitude," said Mark Canning, a spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in the south China city of Guangzhou.

Smugglers, however, have reportedly promised their customers that the United States will grant amnesty (freedom from prosecution as an illegal immigrant) after the November presidential election. Smugglers have also enticed their victims to Australia with tales of work during this summer's Olympic Games and an amnesty after the games.