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Dead by Dover The battle against human-smugglers
is a tough one
Wednesday, June 21, 2000
Whoever persuaded desperate Chinese
migrants to crowd into the back of a Dutch-registered truck for passage
into Britain was at best criminally negligent -- the refrigeration was
turned off on a hot day, the doors were locked from the outside, the truck
sat for a day in the sun on a Belgian dock -- and at worst guilty of
manslaughter. The horrible results were revealed on Monday when British
customs officers, looking past a load of imported tomatoes, discovered 58
dead bodies.
Two other occupants had somehow survived, and are being kept under
tight police guard, which is all too understandable. As Mark Pugash of the
Kent police said, "If you were one of those responsible for it, you
wouldn't want to have any survivors around afterward."
This phenomenon of human-smuggling is a familiar one in the United
States, where as many as 300 migrants die each year -- many from heat
exhaustion or suffocation in sealed trucks -- while trying to slip across
the border from Mexico. It is certainly familiar in Canada, where
officials have spent $30-million over the past year to handle 590 Chinese migrants who arrived last summer in four
ships off British Columbia.
Those migrants had started their journey in China's Fujian province --
as, reportedly, did the 60 found in Dover -- and either paid or promised
to pay sums as great as $60,000 (U.S.) a head to the smugglers, known as
"snakeheads," who arranged their passage. Of the B.C. crowd, many have
been deported back to China, and many, fearing deportation, have escaped
custody; speculation is that they fled to New York City to work off their
debts to the snakeheads in restaurants, sweatshops or prostitution
rings.
Those who seek these illegal routes into the western lands of
opportunity -- and other routes that pass through Singapore and South
Africa, or the Middle East, or Eastern Europe -- are driven by a desire to
trade the limits of Fujian for what they consider the golden possibilities
of countries such as Canada and the U.S. It is not clear how realistic
their expectations are. Have they heard from others of the detention that
awaits them, or the often life-threatening hardships of the trip here? Do
they set off willing to trade misery and possibly death for the chance at
a less restricted and wealthier life? Or are they fed lies and fables
about the obstacles?
Canada, which can almost count on another stream of Fujian migrants
this summer, confronts a powerful combination of people willing to pay
anything to migrate and organized networks willing to break any laws for a
high enough price. After our immigration system pulls the people from
ships or trucks, it slowly determines their future. Which ones does it
accept as refugees, defined as those with a genuine fear of persecution if
they return home? Which does it accept on humanitarian grounds? Which does
it send back to whatever treatment (reports vary; some speak of fines,
beatings, even labour camps) China administers to illegal emigrants?
This sorting of humans from humans is a dispiriting business, however
necessary it may be to ensure the integrity of a country's immigration
system. It is also an infuriating business, since it speaks to an
inability to stop the kingpins behind the smuggling. As Britain copes with
the dead at Dover, and hopes for new leads from the two survivors, it is
not alone in its desire to track down those in command of what Prime
Minister Tony Blair rightly calls an "evil trade," where 58 deaths are
written off as a business deal gone bad.
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