Friday, August 13, 1999

David Rennie
The Daily Telegraph

BEIJING - The arrival of 130 illegal Chinese immigrants on a deserted, rocky beach in the Queen Charlotte Islands has raised fears that Canada is now a prime target for gangs of people smugglers, known as "snakeheads."

The Chinese gangs charge up to $70,000 to smuggle people to the West, where accomplices arrange jobs in restaurants, brothels and sweatshops. Most fly to the West with false or stolen papers. Others risk drowning, starvation and pirates by sailing to Sydney or Tokyo.

The United States immigration service has reported ''a surge of unprecedented magnitude'' in illegal arrivals on the Pacific island of Guam, which smugglers portray as a gateway to mainland America. So many were intercepted this year that authorities have turned a Second World War airfield into a detention camp on the nearby Mariana islands.

Boatloads more turned up in Australia, lured by false promises of jobs at the Sydney Olympic Games, or a millennium amnesty for illegal immigrants. New Zealand recently rushed a bill through parliament allowing for the indefinite detention of illegal immigrants.

China has now launched a crackdown on the snakeheads. But in the coastal villages of southeastern China's Fujian province, a building boom is testament to the thousands more who successfully escape to the West.

Huge new houses, churches and temples have been built with money sent back from overseas, their show-off turrets or Chinese pagoda roofs towering above the brick huts of the less fortunate. Farmland is shrinking as crops are replaced by yet more mansions. Few new businesses are created by the remittance money, and drug use is on the rise.

Jinfeng, near the provincial capital, Fuzhou, has a "widows' village" where it is said all the men have left for America. In nearby Houyu, four-fifths of the population have left in the past decade.

In Yangyu village, Mr. Lin, the father of a waitress working illegally in London, told how his son was beaten to death by paramilitary police three years ago en route to Japan by boat. But the old man proudly showed off Yangyu's mariners' temple, newly restored in thanks for keeping emigrants safe on the high seas. Inside, an honour board records donations, all in U.S. dollars and all from illegal migrants to America.

One of the few young men to be seen in Houyu had already been caught once, as he tried to fly to America via Hong Kong. The trip cost $70,000, he said. Only another attempt could clear his debts. "I'm just waiting for my second chance," said the 30-year-old.

RELATED SITES:

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Citizenship and Immigration Canada

The brand-new white paper on immigration policy

Statistics Canada: Immigration and Citizenship

Statistics from the 1996 national census that look at where Canadians came from.