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Smuggling of Chinese Ends in a Box of Death,
Squalor
Stowaways: In Seattle, 3 bodies, 15 traumatized men are found in cargo
container in latest illegal migrant case.
By KIM MURPHY, Times Staff Writer
SEATTLE--Their
prison was a 40-foot-long metal box, stuffed deep into the cargo hold of a
ship. In darkness lit only by flashlights, 18 men sat on old blankets and
cardboard boxes. First, they spent five days at the Chinese docks, waiting
to be loaded. Then, a two-week journey across the Pacific.
When they got hungry, they had crackers,
rice and water. When the seas turned rough, they had buckets for toilets.
The flashlights gave out after a few days.
When immigration officers peeled back
the container top this week, 15 blinking, sick men crawled out, barefooted
and barely able to stand. Three others lay dead in the mess inside. The
holes in the canvas top, through which the men inside were able to get
air, showed where some had tried to punch their way out, only to find
themselves buried beneath four other massive containers in the hold of the
ship.
"They were virtually entombed
there," said Sharon Gavin, spokeswoman for the Immigration and
Naturalization Service. "You had 18 people in total darkness, stuck in
this container with their own human waste, exposed to extremely cold
temperatures. The people who died may have been dead anywhere from three
to seven days, and you're still stuck in the container with them. It's
disgusting." Officials had the stowaways wear masks in case they were
infected with communicable diseases.
But
in what is becoming a wave of illegal Chinese immigration on board
container ships bound for the West Coast, authorities Tuesday found 19
more stowaways at the Port of Seattle. The arrests, coming just one day
after the shipment that left three men dead, brought to 203 the number of
people smuggled in containers over the past year into the U.S. and Canada.
Officials say the bulk of the illegal
migrants are from the southern Chinese province of Fujian, where thousands
of young workers have agreed to years of indentured servitude for the
chance to work at low-paying jobs in America, mostly in the Northeast.
It is an epidemic that has brought
embarrassment to the Chinese government in Beijing and is rooted, in part,
in decades of illicit economic interdependence between Fujian and
Taiwan--its neighbor 100 miles across the sea--and that island nation's
connections to jobs in America, political analysts said.
The number of migrants from the Fujian
region arriving in the New York area has reached 200,000 over the last two
decades, said Graham Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of
British Columbia who is an expert on Chinese immigration. Many of them, he
said, must work at wages of $200 a month or less to pay off fees to
smugglers that now average $50,000.
"We're looking at something very like
indentured labor," Johnson said. "They're working in the restaurant trade;
women may well be forced into prostitution, sweat shops, of which there
are large numbers--they will do anything."
Over the last several years, American
and Canadian authorities have intercepted large numbers of illegal Chinese
migrants stuffed into old cargo ships and fishing vessels--their human
cargo often dumped near shore to complete the journey on their own.
As recently as last summer, Canadian
officials intercepted four boatloads of nearly 600 Chinese migrants, all
from Fujian, many of whom quickly claimed refugee status and subsequently
disappeared. Most of them, Johnson said, were bound for the porous border
between Canada and the U.S.
Not all of
them have been near death; several arrested in Seattle earlier this month
walked out of their container, equipped with fans and mattresses, sporting
new clothes and a cell phone.
Officials
say the use of container ships for smuggling humans is a relatively new
phenomenon, presenting substantial difficulties for law enforcement.
"This is a new tactic, being able to
bring them in smaller groups," Gavin said. "These ships carry upward of a
thousand containers or more. So in this case, it's almost like the
needle-in-a-haystack type of situation. . . . There's such a large number
of containers on so many container ships, coming into a number of
different ports along the coast."
In
October, the Pu Progress, a freighter registered in Singapore, entered the
Port of Long Beach carrying 54 illegal immigrants from China. A total of
143 illegal immigrants have been detained on ships arriving in Los Angeles
and Long Beach over the last year.
Seattle and the Canadian port of
Vancouver have intercepted several more. Seattle was able to make one of
the first criminal cases against migrant smugglers earlier this month,
filing federal charges against three men who were arrested after
apparently trying to meet a container ship carrying 12 stowaways.
The men, identified as Sheng Ding, Ju
Shu Huang and Yu Zheng, are scheduled for a hearing Friday in U.S.
District Court. They were detained after being seen driving uncertainly in
the area around the ship. When asked where they were headed, the driver of
the car pointed to a map and replied, "Chinatown."
There had been no recorded fatalities
before Monday's discovery of the desperate stowaways aboard the NYK Cape
May at Seattle's Harbor Island. It left Hong Kong on Dec. 27.
Acting on a tip from authorities in Hong
Kong, INS officials met the ship and had to remove 35 other containers
before reaching the one with the sick and dead men inside.
Although autopsies have not yet been
completed, authorities suspect dehydration as a cause of death.
Fourteen of the men found Monday were
admitted to the hospital, and seven remained hospitalized Tuesday in
satisfactory condition, suffering from malnutrition and dehydration.
"I talked to one of the mates [on the
ship], and he said they had run into some rough seas. People were getting
woozy, and if you've ever been seasick, you get dehydrated very bad," said
Scott Guntle, a longshoreman who helped unload the container. "It's just a
sad situation, to see people die to get into this country."
Said Bob Coleman, the acting INS
director in Seattle who was down at the docks: "I've never seen a group of
people so disoriented and so distraught as they were when we found them. .
. . This is a human tragedy."
During a
visit to Seattle on Tuesday, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said that "anybody
that traffics in human beings is, I think, the worst kind of criminal."
Federal authorities, she said, would work to identify the smugglers and
bring charges against them.
INS
officials said they have no reason to believe that shipping company
officials were aware of the stowaways. Port authorities in Hong Kong
repeatedly have provided tips that have enabled authorities here to make
arrests, they said.
But there is no way
of knowing how many stowaways made it ashore without INS interception.
Fujian and the neighboring province of
Guandong historically have been the source of the bulk of the Chinese,
with young workers for about 300 years departing a marginal agricultural
economy for higher-paying jobs abroad.
However, it was Taiwan's strengthening
links to the United States over the last several decades that increasingly
lured them toward American shores--particularly migrants from the regions
of Chang Le and Lian Jiang, nearest Taiwan, Johnson said.
"I think myself that the so-called
snakeheads, or the bosses who orchestrate this movement, are a combination
of Taiwanese and American Chinese who together see that there is a great
deal of profit to be made from moving people illegally into the U.S.," he
said.
"So what is happening at the
moment is that notices are going up in the villages saying there's
industrial work in the United States. They'll quote a sum of money which
by local standards seems astronomical but by American standards is of
course virtually slave labor. And the catch is you have to come up with
$30,000 to $50,000 to get there, and you have to put some of that down,
and then you are guaranteed passage to the United States."
David Bachman, chairman of the China
studies program at the University of Washington, said Beijing has been
embarrassed by the illegal immigration. But local officials in Fujian, he
said, have everything to gain.
"It's
taking some people out of the population pool, which makes it easier for
them to fulfill the population quota. And down the road there will be
remittances back to Fujian that will help to bring prosperity," he said.
"So even if they're not directly benefiting from bribes or kickbacks,
Fujian is going to come out beneficially from this process."
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