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Tuesday, January 11, 2000
First deaths reported in new illegal-alien smuggling trend
By MICHAEL J. MARTINEZ -- Associated Press
SEATTLE -- Three Chinese stowaways were found dead
this week in a cargo container that arrived aboard a ship from Hong Kong
-- the first known deaths in what has suddenly become one of the busiest
methods of smuggling immigrants into the United States.
Crammed into 40-foot, canvas-topped corrugated-metal
boxes, the stowaways try to survive on bottled water and little food for
the two-week voyage across the Pacific from China.
Immigration officers have stepped up efforts to catch
the immigrants and the smugglers they pay up to $50,000 to make the trip,
but the boxes keep coming.
"Until now, the prices
migrants have paid for illegal passage to the United States have been high
in terms of dollars," said Bob Coleman, acting director of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service in Seattle, "but in a situation like this,
where lives are lost, the cost is unfathomable."
On
Monday, federal officials boarded the Cape May, a Japanese-owned freighter
that left Hong Kong for Seattle on Dec. 27, and found three dead Chinese
and 15 others in threadbare clothes and bare feet. All of them required
medical care, and seven remained hospitalized Tuesday in satisfactory
condition. The cause of the deaths was not released.
On Tuesday morning, 19 more immigrants, all in
relatively good health, were found in a container from a ship that
likewise docked in Hong Kong before arriving here.
INS
spokeswoman Irene Mortensen said conditions inside the container from the
Cape May were deplorable. People barely had enough room to lie down, and
had only the bedding and survival gear they brought with them.
Food consisted of slowly rotting vegetables and
crackers. The only toilet was a bucket; the only ventilation came from
holes cut in the canvas roof.
For anywhere from three
to seven days, the 15 survivors, many of them seasick, lay next to the
bodies of the dead.
Last month, authorities in Long
Beach, Calif., arrested 30 illegal immigrants from China after they
crossed the Pacific in cargo containers.
Their travel
conditions were better than those of the group caught in Seattle. The
containers had food, water, battery-powered lights, portable potties, cell
phones and ladders for climbing out.
For years,
Chinese smugglers called "snakeheads" have been bringing illegal
immigrants to this country aboard ships to both coasts and through Canada.
But the use of the sealed containers is a relatively new twist, and
Monday's deaths were the first known to have occurred through that method.
In the past year, authorities caught 203 people
smuggled via container to West Coast ports in the United States and
Canada. How many more make it through isn't known.
Most West Coast ports handle freight almost
exclusively in containers. The ports move tens of thousands of containers
each year -- the largest ships carry 5,000 or more -- and there is no
telling from the outside which of the boxes might hold people.
"There's certainly a growing sophistication on the
part of smugglers," said David Bachman, chairman of the University of
Washington's China studies program. "I would expect that for each
container caught, there must be some multiple that are getting through."
Hong Kong officials have vowed to crack down on human
smuggling. Some speculate that rival smuggling gangs have been anonymously
tipping off authorities, trying to drive each other out of business.
After a meeting late Tuesday, Hong Kong customs
officials pledged to step up inspection of ships leaving Hong Kong,
including the use of modern technology such as heat detection, to prevent
illegal migrants from boarding the ships or hiding in containers.
Shipping companies pledged to immediately report any
suspicious looking cargo on their ships, and to scrutinize business
registration and documentation of new clients before accepting shipments.
"Apart from these measures, the Hong Kong customs will
reinforce the terminal patrol inside the container storage yard," Hong
Kong customs senior superintendent Ronald Aau Yee-Leung said in a
statement released after the meeting.
Despite the
arrests and recent deaths, human smuggling is expected to continue as
Chinese lured by dreams of financial or political freedom try to get to
the United States. The INS estimates as many as 27,000 illegal Chinese
were in the United States in 1996.
"These are people
who are glad and happy to go through something like this in order to reach
America," said Dan Danilov, an immigration attorney representing three of
the latest illegal immigrants to arrive in Seattle. "This means a new life
for them."
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