STORY: A FISHERIES patrol plane spotted it first - a rusty
old cargo
ship, unmarked and unflagged, lurking off the coast of
Vancouver Island.
That alone stood out amid the usual traffic of fishing
boats and barges.
But coast-guard officials got a bigger surprise when they
boarded the
vessel. Jammed inside its stinking, garbage-strewn hold
were 123
mainland China migrants, wobbly-kneed after a 39-day voyage
across
the Pacific.
Immigration officials hoped the 20 July incident was an
isolated event.
But three weeks later, a second boatload of mainlanders
splashed
ashore. On 31 August, the Canadian navy seized a third boat
off the
coast; nine days later, a fourth.
In all, 599 boat people have been caught since July - no
one knows how
many boatloads got through undetected - and more may be on
the way.
British Columbia has become an improbable back door to New
York
City, the first landfall along a route of human smuggling
that begins in the
poverty of the mainland's Fujian province and ends in the
sweatshops of
New York's Chinatown.
The migrants, nearly all of them seeking refugee status in
Canada by
claiming they were persecuted on the mainland, are
straining
government budgets and reigniting debate over Canada's
immigration
laws.
It's not as if a creaky old boat is the only way into
Canada. About 25,000
refugee claims are submitted each year by new arrivals from
all
countries, and about half are approved, said Lorna Tessier,
a
spokeswoman for the Department of Citizenship and
Immigration.
But never have so many would-be refugees arrived all at
once, and in
such dramatic fashion. During their 9,654-kilometre voyage
across the
Pacific, many migrants got only a bowl of rice and two
glasses of
questionable water each day.
``It speaks to the level of desperation these people
feel,'' Ms Tessier
said. ``That's a long crossing with no washrooms, no beds,
and
contaminated water.''
The journey begins in Fujian on the mainland's southeast
coast, where
smugglers, known as snakeheads, approach impoverished
farmers and
other villagers with an alluring sales pitch.
``They're told a story about the good life here,'' said
Victor Wong, head
of the Vancouver Association of Chinese Canadians. Passage
costs up
to US$38,000 (HK$296,000), but most migrants pay little or
no money
up front, pledging to repay their debt once they're
working.
``They're told that if they work three years, they'll be
home free,'' Wong
said. ``They're told they'll make the trip in an ocean
liner.''
The reality is more like what happened to Yu Ying Chen, a
skinny,
wavy-haired 18-year-old who arrived on 11 August. After
nearly two
months at sea, the boat Mr Chen was on slipped past
Canadian patrols
in the fog and nosed in close to the shore of Kungit
Island, 804
kilometres north of Vancouver.
The rocky, spruce-studded island is as remote a spot as any
along
British Columbia's coastline. The smugglers told Mr Chen
and the other
129 passengers to look for a road, even though they had no
way of
knowing whether there were any towns or roads in the area.
There weren't. Mr Chen and the others, including children
as young as
eight, waded through the surf and huddled on a windy beach
as the boat
that dropped them off vanished back into the fog.
Canadian authorities caught up with the vessel 129
kilometres out to
sea and arrested its nine crew members. Coast-guard boats,
meanwhile, ferried Mr Chen and the other migrants 10 hours
south to
the Vancouver Island town of Port Hardy, where they boarded
buses for
an 8-hour drive to a Canadian navy base near Victoria.
Early last month, after six weeks in jail, Mr Chen found
himself in a stuffy
hearing room in downtown Vancouver. Shackled and dressed in
jail-issue red pants and shirt, the teenager sat nervously,
slumping
against the wall, occasionally lifting both cuffed hands to
push his hair
from his forehead.
This was a detention hearing before an Immigration and
Refugee Board
adjudicator, held to determine whether Mr Chen should be
released
while his refugee claim was reviewed.
Through a Putonghua-language interpreter, Mr Chen said he
wanted
asylum in Canada.
He said he had a relative in Toronto, but when pressed for
specifics, he
couldn't provide any.
The adjudicator ordered him held for another month,
suggesting that he
might be released later if the Toronto relative
materialised and could put
up a US$15,000 deposit.
Mr Chen nodded grimly and shuffled out of the room on the
arm of a
guard, heading back to jail for another month.
The sudden influx of mainlanders has put government
officials in a bind.
It's expensive - more than US$5 million so far _ to detain
migrants while
their refugee claims are reviewed, a process that can take
up to a year.
But few who are released ever show up for their hearings.
Eighty-six of those arriving on the first boat were
released, and at least
51 of them have vanished, presumed to have skipped town,
said Lois
Reimer, a spokeswoman for the Immigration Department.
``They are part of one of the grandest smuggling schemes
ever seen by
the Canada Immigration Department,'' says a document that
the agency
filed to argue for keeping the rest of the boat people
locked up. ``The
snakeheads and their emissaries are always waiting in the
shadows to
retrieve their clients upon their release from immigration
custody.''
According to investigators, the smuggling pipeline
stretches from
Vancouver to Toronto, where migrants are kept in safe
houses and then
taken into the United States through Indian reservations on
the border.
Their destination usually is New York City, where they've
been promised
under-the-table jobs in Chinatown.
Canada is a country built by immigrants, with an
increasingly Oriental
flavour. About 7 per cent of Canada's 29 million residents
are of Asian
origin, according to census figures. Vancouver, which is 25
per-cent
Asian, is jokingly called Hongcouver in Hong Kong.
But the sudden wave of boat people has prompted calls for
stricter
enforcement against illegal immigration and tougher
criteria in granting
refugee status. Many Canadians, especially other
immigrants, resent
that boat people are ``jumping the queue'' ahead of aliens
who may wait
years for permission to move here.
``You feel sorry for them as human beings, but there are
ways to come
into the country legally,'' said Betty Hamilton, 55, who
runs a
bed-and-breakfast in Port Hardy.
She joined several hundred onlookers in August when Coast
Guard
boats arrived in the harbour with Mr Chen and the other 129
mainlanders from the second boat. As the newcomers were
ushered
ashore, one resident welcomed them by playing ``O Canada''
on a
trumpet, over and over. But four Indian women from a nearby
reservation
protested, wearing placards that said ``Feed our People
First.''
Ms Hamilton believes the boat people are naive.
``They come in blinded by a big dream that isn't here,''
she said. ``They
are victims, as far as I'm concerned. As I watched their
faces go by,
some of the young ones looked so hard already, and others
looked
bewildered. I don't think they have a clue about what
awaits them.''
Mr Wong, of the Chinese Canadian association, said treating
the
newcomers like criminals was a cruel thing to do to people
seeking
sanctuary from persecution. While others contend that the
boat people
merely are trying to escape poverty, Mr Wong said most of
the migrants
have genuine concerns about human rights abuses on the
mainland.
``They're leaving to escape China's one-child policy,'' he
said, referring
to the limits the communist government places on family
size. ``Or
they're trying to escape religious persecution. Some are
Christians, and
Christians are known to be persecuted in Fujian province.
Or they're
persecuted as an ethnic minority.''
Beijing has urged Canada to return all the boat people to
the mainland,
to discourage illegal immigration.
``There is no political persecution in China,'' Foreign
Ministry
spokesman Sun Yuxi said on 7 September at a Beijing news
briefing.
``Most of these migrants are farmers. They are not
political refugees.''
Whatever their motives, they are likely to keep coming. The
grapevine in
Vancouver's Chinatown has it that about a dozen boats had
left Fujian
province by early September, though the publicity
surrounding the first
four boats may have diverted later vessels to other
countries in search
of quieter landings.
The navy, coast guard and Royal Canadian Mounted Police are
on alert.
Officials say winter weather may temporarily stop the boat
traffic, but
they're not counting on it. And navy officials concede they
might not
catch every boat venturing across their area of
responsibility, a
storm-raked 1,679,360 square kilometres of Pacific Ocean.
``You're looking at an area the size of British Columbia,
Alberta and
Saskatchewan put together,'' said navy spokesman Lt David
McKinnon.
Authorities say none of the four recently arrived boats met
minimal
safety standards for a long voyage.
The third boat's hull was rusted so badly it appeared to be
painted
orange, and officials quickly loaded its passengers onto
other boats
because they feared the vessel might not make it the last
few miles to
shore.
The Pacific is wide, and its storms are fierce. Ms Reimer,
of the
immigration department, believes a rickety boat stuffed
full of migrants
could leave the mainland and easily disappear.
If it did, she said, ``people may never know.'' - AP
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