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By Sea

Chinese illegal immigrants inside the hold of a smuggling ship - Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard

Tougher security measures in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have further decreased Chinese human smuggling by sea, says Commander Chris Carter, head of the Coast Guard Migrant Interdiction Division in Washington, D.C.

"The Coast Guard is requiring 96 hours advance notice of crew and cargo manifests, which we didn't use to do," Carter said in a recent interview. "And those are all run through the various intelligence shops to determine which cargo and passenger vessels we're going to board and inspect."

Demands on fishing vessels have gotten more stringent as well, Carter said.

"It used to be a fishing vessel could provide what was called a 'crew manifest' -- in other words, the crew did not have to be individually documented," Carter said. But under this system, he explained, a few illegal immigrants could be mixed in with the legitimate fishermen and could escape detection.


"INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) is no longer permitting that," Carter said. "And everybody arriving must be individually documented. So that's another tightening up in an attempt to locate illegal migrants and miscreants."

Smuggling Chinese illegal immigrants via dangerously decrepit fishing vessels seems to have subsided, but the U.S. Coast Guard is now seeing new methods being used to make the trip to the United States by sea.

In previous years, human smugglers -- or "snakeheads" -- bought aging fishing boats in China and Taiwan and packed them with as many illegal immigrants as possible. The passengers suffered under terrible conditions and were subject to abuse at the hands of the smugglers. Their misery went on for two months or more -- the average time required for such vessels to ply their way across the ocean. Unknown numbers of passengers died, and some of the "rust buckets" may have sunk.

But as Coast Guard interdictions went up and more would-be migrants became aware of the risks involved in smuggling by sea, new techniques evolved.

One method the Coast Guard still sees involves fishing boats registered with Taiwan, which take on crews from mainland China, Carter said.

Many legitimate Taiwanese fishing operations will use mainland crews simply because they are willing to do the backbreaking labor for lower wages.

But in the case of a human-smuggling operation, the crew "mutinies" as the boat reaches Guam, the U.S. West Coast, or Canada. "The master is forced to bring them close to shore so they can get off the vessel," Carter said.

In this situation, the master of the vessel finds himself an unwitting accomplice, but it is possible that in some "mutinies" he may be a willing participant, Carter said.

"The crew will fill the boat with fish," Carter said. "Then, as they approach Guam, the captain gets on the radio and he calls his boat's owners and says, 'Help! I'm being hijacked!'"

"A few days later, he will call again saying: 'Well, they got off in Guam, and oh, by the way, I'm coming home with a load of fish and no crewmembers that need to be paid.'"

Was the boat master a victim?

"In cases where United States Attorneys have been able to interview the crew, the crewmembers insist that they paid the master to smuggle them. But when we interview the masters, they insist that they were hijacked. Somebody is lying," Carter said.

Another technique is for the illegal immigrants -- who hold stolen documents or very good fakes -- to fly through Europe to places in South America such as Panama, Peru and Surinam, where legitimate Chinese companies operate construction projects using contract labor.

"We believe that these are totally legitimate enterprises," Carter said, "but they probably provide a framework and an infrastructure that a parasitic illegal network can adhere to and take advantage of."

Surinam is especially attractive for human smuggling, since the country has no laws to prohibit it, Carter explained. Once there, the illegal aliens reach the U.S. Virgin Islands using one of hundreds of wooden freighters or fishing boats that sail the coasts.

A major obstacle to controlling illegal human smuggling is that many countries have no laws to prohibit it, Carter said. "We need to educate governments, get them to criminalize it, and then see what we can do from there," he said.

Tougher anti-terrorist security may be helping to prevent smuggling tragedies like that of the Cape May, when 3 Chinese illegal immigrants died in a cargo container discovered in Seattle in January 2000.

But Commander Carter says there is also evidence that the ever growing fees Chinese illegal immigrants pay to their smugglers are making it more cost effective to buy stolen travel documents or top-quality forgeries.

The smugglers change with the times, Carter acknowledged. "They've gone to a more individually oriented system; they're not trying to evade us, they're trying to fool us."