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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