The War on Snakeheads - The Mexican border isn't only front in the struggle with illegal immigration

Weekly Standard ^ | 04/19/2006 | James Thayer

[Tailgunner Joe]

THE DOG LEAPT FOR JOY, scratching the corrugated steel with his front paws, tail wagging wildly. Then, remembering the protocol, the dog--mostly German shepherd, but maybe some lab thrown in--dutifully lowered itself to its haunches and stared fixedly at the steel container's doors.

Looming above was the black hull of the container ship Cape May, berthed at the Port of Seattle's Harbor Island Terminal 18. A 1,500-ton orange crane continued to lift containers from the Cape May's deck and lower them to the dock. A small rain had made the pier shiny.

When the trainer led the reluctant dog away, agents moved in, ratcheting open the container's metal doors. The agents' black coats were stamped with blocky white letters: POLICE. The doors swung fully open.

Sitting amid three-foot-high mounds of raw garbage were 15 Chinese men. They squinted against the sudden light and shifted nervously.

"Come out," an INS agent called in Cantonese. "One at a time."

After a moment, a man inside the 40-foot container asked in a weak voice "Can we bring some clothes?"

Soon the stowaways began emerging from the filth-strewn container, where they had been sealed since the ship had left Hong Kong 14 days earlier. To a man, they walked feebly, some of them kept upright only by the arms of an INS agent. Their jaws were slack and their faces blank. The agents guided them to a nearby spot on the dock, where the stowaways squatted, some leaning sideways, unable to keep themselves upright. White blankets were gently draped over their shoulders to keep off the Seattle chill.

Inside the container, almost lost among the rotting vegetables, soiled clothes, and buckets of human waste, were three bodies.

The 15 men who had survived the crossing were searched, given quick medical exams, then taken in white vans to an INS facility. A fourth emigrant would soon die. A coroner would conclude that the four had perished of starvation and dehydration aggravated by seasickness.

American eyes are turned to the south, where Mexicans slip en masse through the sieve at the border. But an estimated one-fifth of America's illegal immigrants enter via Seattle and other northern ports and border crossings. The Cape May container tragedy occurred on January 10, 2000. Early this month 22 stowaways from Shanghais were found in a container offloaded from the M/V Rotterdam in Seattle.

So the trade continues but, unlike at the porous Mexican border, the trade does not continue unabated. The smuggling of Chinese into this country is dangerous, dehumanizing, and illegal, and American authorities are making significant strides in thwarting it.

CHINESE call the United States the Golden Mountain. Most Chinese smuggled into America come from rural villages in Fujian Province on the country's southeast coast, across the Formosa Strait from Taiwan. The State Department reports that workers in these towns earn only an eighth what someone would in Shanghais or Guangzhou, and a twentieth what they might in even a low-paying job in the United States. Journalist Marlowe Hood says that in some Fujian villages emigration is viewed as the only way a young person can succeed, and that no industry has developed in some towns because most working-age men have left China. Sending family members overseas to work has been a custom for generations. Ko-lin Chin, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University and the author of Smuggled Chinese, says, "When people [in Fujian Province] get together they always talk about how their sons or daughters or relatives or husbands or brothers are doing in the United States."

Chinese call those who are smuggled out of the country man-snakes, and the organizers of the enterprise are known as snakeheads. Big snakeheads are the planners and investors, who often live outside China. Little snakeheads are recruiters who find customers in the Fujian villages. The fee paid to the snakehead is substantial: the 22 Chinese found in the Rotterdam container had paid $40,000 each for the ride. It might've been a bargain. Professor Chin and Sheldon Zhang, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at San Diego State University, have concluded that fees typically are $50,000 to $60,000 and may run as high as $200,000 per person. The State Department says that the smuggling of humans into the United States is a $10 billion annual business.

But where does a impoverished peasant from rural Fujian Province come up with the staggering sum of $40,000, more than he would earn in 20 years in China? He borrows it. Professor Chin says the average down payment made to the smugglers is about $3,000, an amount loaned by friends and family. The snakehead then carries the remainder on his books, to be collected in the United States after the emigrant finds a job.

Not all of the $40,000 is profit. Professors Chin and Zhang say that a big snakehead may pay up to $1,000 per client to the Fujian town recruiter, $8,000 per smuggled person for bribery at checkpoints, as much as $5,000 per emigrant for escort through transit points. And then there are the stateside debt collectors, who will often resort to kidnapping and torture, and who keep up to half the money they collect as a fee.

ARE THE SMUGGLING GANGS stand-alone organizations or are they tied to the entrenched criminal organizations called triads? Federal prosecutors believe the smuggling is run by two triads, Sun Yee On and Shui Fong. Founded in 1919, Sun Yee On is based in Hong Kong with a reported 25,000 members in the city and another 25,000 around the world. Shui Fong originated as a Hong Kong soft drink company union, and spent much of the 1990s in a vicious war with another triad, 14K, over control of Macau casinos.

But Professors Chin and Zhang, who interviewed 129 persons they identified as smugglers in New York City, Los Angeles, and Fujian Province, report they "were unable to find a connection between their subject's illegal endeavors and traditional organized crime organizations."

Smugglers strive to remain invisible, and reliable data on their success or failure can't be had, but U.S. authorities believe fewer illegal Chinese emigrants are coming to America via the sea. One of the reasons is the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which made penalties for smuggling humans more severe. Another reason is that the RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute is now being used against the smugglers. And the Coast Guard is now requiring submission of crew and cargo manifests 96 hours before a vessel arrives in a U.S. port. Each crew member must be individually identified, another change in the law. Commander Chris Carter, head of the Coast Guard Migrant Interdiction Division, says, "And those are all run through the various intelligence shops to determine which cargo and passenger vessels we're going to board and inspect."

The most dramatic effect of the new efforts is the decline of the use of fishing vessels to smuggle Chinese emigrants. In years past, snakeheads would purchase dilapidated trawlers and fill them with emigrants, sometimes stuffing hundreds of them into a hold. The crossing might take two months, during which the emigrants were often brutalized by the crew. Deaths were common. New U.S. laws and increased Coast Guard interdictions have reduced smuggling by fishing trawler.

Smuggling by freight container also appears to be decreasing. The smugglers' Rotterdam container found earlier this month was the first discovered in Seattle since the deadly Cape May container back in January 2000. Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told the Seattle Times that in the late 1990s finding stowaways at Los Angeles ports was almost a weekly event, but there have been only "two or three [incidents] in L.A. in the last two or three years." She terms it a sharp decline.

But it's hard to tell about overall numbers. Commander Carter says that the smugglers change with the times. "They're trying to fool us."

An example of their ingenuity: snakeheads now will provide mainland Chinese crews to legitimate Taiwan fishing vessels. The crew will work across the ocean, loading the vessel with fish, until the boat nears Guam or the American or Canadian coasts, when the crew will mutiny--sort of a friendly mutiny--forcing the skipper to drop them off on land. Commander Carter says the skipper then radios his Taiwan office, "'Well, they got off in Guam, and oh, by the way, I'm coming home with a load of fish and no crewmembers that need to be paid.'"

Another example: snakeheads increasingly deposit the emigrants in countries that have no laws against smuggling humans. A favorite is Suriname, the small nation squeezed between French Guiana and Guyana on the north coast of South America. Once there, Commander Carter says, the Chinese emigrants make their way to the United States in the hundreds of tramp freighters and fishing boats that work the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.

If American authorities have had success--and they believe they have--certainly one of the reasons is the increased prison time for snakeheads who are caught.

Chao Kang Lin was an organizer who placed the Chinese emigrants in the Cape May container, resulting in four deaths. In his sentencing memorandum, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Lord described the torturous conditions in the container, where "Due to the darkness, many confused water bottles with bottles of urine," conditions so grim that one of the stowaways died within a day of leaving Hong Kong. U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein gave no shift to Chao Kang Lin's plea for clemency, saying the Cape May smuggler's sentence must serve as a warning to those who would trade in human cargo.

Snakehead Lin was sentenced to the maximum allowed by law: nine years in a federal penitentiary.

[clawrence3]

I've always thought a wall along ONE border would not solve illegal immigration.

[dljordan]

Did you know the Chinese are REFUSING to take back their illegals?

[TheLion]

"I've always thought a wall along ONE border would not solve illegal immigration."

It would certainly solve the bulk of it.

[TheLion]

I thought we had reached some sort of agreement with them on this?

[clawrence3]

And cause how many other problems?

[TheLion]

Ping!

[TheLion]

What problems?

[seastay]

only 15? if there were a only few million more we could have some lively debates over which elected official eats more egg rolls or which can say the pledge of allegiance back wards in Chinese the quickest....

[TheLion]

Ping!

[Paperdoll]

These people may earn 1/8 of what they could earn here in China, but the cost of living there is also commeasurant.

Smuggling immigrants a 10 billion $ business? What is "Homeland Security" doing about that? What did you say? Nothing? Aha!

And what is to happen to the survivors of this invasion?
Sad as their predicament may be, they are breaking the law.
No doubt "Christine" has given them safe haven with all the bennies. Coupled with our government reporting the locations of our militia on the southern border to Mexico, "Homeland Security" is a misnomer if there ever was one! And we are in deep........

[NapkinUser]

"And cause how many other problems?"

Like?

[clawrence3]

Economic collapse and/or global trade war, for starters.

[Smartass]

You're right Lion...Mexico is not alone

---

Two Chinese nationals indicted for smuggling immigrants in a cargo container

Chinese nationals are smuggled into the United States in crates aboard cargo ships

January 14, 2000
Web posted at: 12:29 p.m. EST (1729 GMT)

---

In this story:

Three stowaways found dead in Seattle

Chinese smugglers thought to earn billions

RELATED STORIES, SITES

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From staff and wire reports

SEATTLE, Washington -- Two men have been indicted on charges of trying to smuggle 12 Chinese nationals into the United States inside a cargo container on board a ship traveling from Hong Kong.

A federal grand jury returned a four-count indictment against Yu Zheng and Sheng Ding, both illegal immigrants from China, U.S. Attorney Kate Pflaumer said Thursday. Each faces up to 40 years in prison.

	MESSAGE BOARD
Coming to the USA

Zheng and Ding were arrested January 2 as they waited in a van parked at the Port of Seattle. The stowaways were found inside a filthy cargo container when it was unloaded from the ship OOCL Faith.

Prosecutors said Zheng and Ding charged up to $60,000 for each person smuggled, and were responsible for putting the 12 in the 40-foot container and placing the container onboard the ship.

Three stowaways found dead in Seattle

In the past two-and-a-half weeks, 136 Chinese on eight ships have been seized at ports in California, Washington state and Vancouver, British Columbia.

In another incident in Seattle, customs investigators on Monday found 18 stowaways in a container on a vessel from Hong Kong. Three were dead and seven required hospitalization.

Canadian customs inspector John Henwood in Vancouver described similarly severe conditions for smuggled Chinese. He recently discovered some locked in a dark steel container, using buckets for toilets, a small generator for power and stored water and food for nourishment.

"It was pretty dirty," Henwood said. "Not a good way to travel, definitely not first class."

The Chinese smuggling trend has sparked discussion about what can be done to curb the illegal immigration, from fining or seizing ships to installing container-scanning equipment at ports and strengthening efforts to detect stowaways before ships leave Asian ports.

The illegal immigrants are usually locked in dark steel containers

Chinese smugglers thought to earn billions

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials have said they do not believe the shipping companies themselves are behind the smuggling efforts.

Chinese gangs are believed to be responsible for arranging for people to board ships in exchange for exorbitant fees. Investigators estimate that Chinese smuggling generates $10 billion a year for organized crime.

"Intelligence coming out of the People's Republic of China talks of 18 million people poised to put themselves in that degree of peril to make the type of voyage to one country, or another," said Cpl. Grant Learned of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Many of those who reach the West Coast head for New York, according to George Varnai with Citizenship and Immigration in Canada.

"There is a huge network there, a network that is ... able to house, to locate and employ people in various businesses, so they can begin paying off the huge indentured servitude they have agreed to," Varnai said.

Hong Kong officials and shipping executives said this week they will try to stop the trafficking.

Shipping and customs officials said they can't search every container, but have promised to target those with soft canvas tops, favored by some smugglers because they allow air to filter to people inside.

Some say rival smuggling gangs may be anonymously tipping off authorities, trying to drive each other out of business.

Correspondent Don Knapp and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[Stonewall Jackson]

If you want to read a novel with an interesting take on this, try Stephen J. Cannell's Riding the Snake. Cannell is the guy who came up with the A-Team and numerous other television shows in the 70's and 80's, but he now spends most of his time writing novels.

The basic gist of the story is that an LAPD officer on the outs with her superiors must help a young businessman track down his brother's killers, who happen to be a bunch of smugglers who are bringing thousands of illegal immigrants into the country, along with a stolen Russian backpack nuke, which they want to use against LAX.

The story kind of wanders away from the primary plot at times, but it is a very interesting read.

[TheLion]

Quite an eye opener!

[antceecee]

People who smuggle, employ and encourage this are trafficking in human misery. It's evil.

[Calpernia]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1597900/posts
'Sister Ping' Convicted in Smuggling Scheme

Snakehead

[Smartass]

I can't imagine people crushing themselves into, and living for what ever time it takes a ship to depart and get it's containers unloaded here. Chinese illegal immigrants are living like animals for weeks and weeks on end. There must be other solutions.

[TheLion]

We're going to have to get to the point where every container is checked....maybe at some port before they get to the US.

Wonder what else is getting through.