MADELAINE DROHAN
The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, June 20, 2000

Europe is facing a growing problem of illegal immigration, but not from the Far East so much as from regions closer to home.

War and economic upheaval in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa and the Persian Gulf have ensured that there is a steady stream of migrants, both legal and illegal, knocking on the European Union's front door or sneaking in the back.

"Europe is not a primary destination for the Chinese," said Don DeVoretz, an economist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver who has studied global migration.

But yesterday, British officials made the grisly discovery of 58 dead migrants, thought to be Chinese, in the hold of a truck in the port city of Dover.

Migrants generally seek a settled community of people from their region who speak their language and can help them integrate. That means Europe, and even Canada, is out as a preferred destination for migrants from China, Mr. DeVoretz said, despite the attention paid in Canada in the past year to illegal immigration from China.

"The desired location for them is the United States."

The picture, similarly, has been muddied in Britain by a recent rash of high-profile incidents involving Chinese migrants.

A clergyman's daughter was jailed last month for trying to smuggle 24 Chinese to London from the Netherlands via France. In March, nine Chinese were arrested at a bus stop in the Cotswolds, a tourist area, on suspicion of being illegal immigrants. And Scottish papers have been carrying stories of former Chinese soldiers fighting with gangs in Glasgow for local supremacy.

These are the types of incidents that capture the public imagination without necessarily painting a true picture of the situation, experts say. But such events have succeeded in putting pressure on British authorities to take harsher measures to combat asylum seekers.

Although Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed yesterday to take steps to stamp out what he called "an evil trade," Britain already tightened security at Dover in 1996, when police noticed an increase in organized smuggling. And it set up a new unit to deal with migrant smugglers in 1997.

Figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees indicate that, in April, 27,030 asylum applications were filed in the 24 European countries. The UNHCR uses a broad definition of Europe, which includes not just the 15 EU members, but also the countries surrounding them.

The United Kingdom was the largest recipient of applicants, with 22 per cent of all those filed, followed by Germany, the Netherlands and France.

The former Yugoslavia was the largest source of applicants, followed by Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Russia and China. The Chinese accounted for only 1,199 of the total, or about 4 per cent. They were found largely in Great Britain, France and Germany.

Such figures, of course, do not capture all, or even most, of the migrants who have paid traffickers to smuggle them into Europe, such as those found dead yesterday.

The International Organization for Migration estimated in 1995, for example, that 500,000 women and children were smuggled into Western Europe for the sex industry.

The European experience with asylum seekers, both legal and illegal, makes what has happened in Canada seem pale by comparison. Mr. DeVoretz said he had a German audience chuckling when he talked about the influx of Chinese on Canada's West Coast last summer, especially when he mentioned that the total was 648 people.

Once in Europe, illegal migrants can travel freely between most European countries because border controls have been removed between 12 of the 15 European Union states. On roads and railways, it can be difficult to tell where one country ends and another begins. Britain, Ireland and Denmark are the three countries that are not part of this arrangement.

All countries who are recipients of smuggled migrants find that the economic incentive to traffic in people has drawn in organized crime. British Home Secretary Jack Straw noted yesterday that the profits to be made are "very, very substantial indeed."

In his book Workers Without Frontiers, released by the International Labour Organization, author Peter Stalker said smugglers can earn $750 for each person brought in a car across a European border or in a boat from Morocco to Spain. The price for bringing a migrant from China can be as high as $45,000.

Those being smuggled also have an economic incentive to take the risk, he noted, pointing to surveys showing that a Mexican earning $45 a week at home can earn 10 times that in the United States.

"In a world of winners and losers, the losers do not simply disappear, they seek somewhere else to go," Mr. Stalker concluded.

Numerous international organizations, including the ILO, Europol and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, are now investigating human trafficking.

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