From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Jul 30 2009 - 20:58:25 EDT
A Chinese illegal alien is rescued in New York City in 1993, when the
vessel carrying him and at least 200 others ran aground. Six died, and at
least 16 others were injured trying to reach shore.
Michael Alexander / AP
A Chinese illegal alien is rescued in New York City in 1993, when the
vessel carrying him and at least 200 others ran aground. Six died, and at
least 16 others were injured trying to reach shore.
Snakeheads for Hire
A new book about human smuggling from China into the U.S. offers a glimpse
into the failures of immigration policy in the 1990s.
By Andrew Bast | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Jul 20, 2009
As immigration reform languishes in Washington and the country
continues to dither about what to do to solve this decade's Mexican
debacle, everyone involved—from policymakers to activists to the
undocumented—would be wise to read Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead:
An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream
(Doubleday). Painstakingly reported and vividly told, the book is actually
less about the American Dream than it is a primer on the scattered policies
that came out of Washington, D.C., as globalization kicked into high gear.
Despite America's status as a nation of immigrants, recent history makes
clear that, well before the George W. Bush era, the country lacked a
workable and humane way of dealing with the millions of people who are
dying (some of them literally) to get into the country every year.
The Snakehead is first and foremost the story of human traffickers, or
"snakeheads," like Sister Ping, a merciless mastermind of the smuggling
trade, who made a fortune by establishing an underground bank to finance an
intricate enterprise of transporting human beings from the Fujian province
of China to the U.S. Ping oversaw her illicit financing system—in which
she stockpiled cash on both sides of the globe and then issued lines of
credit—from her home base in New York's Chinatown. She subcontracted the
shipping, often on vessels that were barely seaworthy, to the countless
opportunists who make the $20 billion global human-smuggling business
possible.
In short, Ping was a gangster. In Chinatown, she forged alliances with
hard-nosed thugs to back her operation. She did business with suitcases
full of cash, sometimes as much as $400,000 at a time. In 1998, after one
of her ships sank and 14 bodies were found dead in the water off the coast
of Guatemala, she considered them a business expense and, in a move worthy
of dark Mafia honor, she paid for their burials. Yet in this underworld,
Keefe argues, something more was going on than Sopranos-style ethics: "In
some ways Sister Ping's organization was less like the Mafia than it was
like a multinational corporation that seeks an optimal economic and
regulatory environment in which to do business." The general global
disorder of the end of the Cold War provided exactly that environment.
And the book is equally a chronicle of failed policy. Reading The
Snakehead, one is struck by the realization that the George H.W. Bush and
Clinton administrations were on the wrong side of globalization, at least
with regard to human smuggling. In the first half of the '90s, remittances
helped push foreign direct capital investment into Fujian from $379 million
to $4.1 billion—shocking numbers that mirror the success of Ping's
smuggling business. Meanwhile, according to Keefe, "criminal sentences for
human smuggling amounted to a slap on the wrist." After the Tiananmen
Square massacre, Bush's asylum policy inadvertently opened the door to
virtually anyone from China who wanted to come to the U.S. By one estimate,
the snakehead trade in the early 1990s had grown to $3.2 billion a year.
Clinton's White House eventually doubled the budget of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service and signed an immigration reform act in 1996, but
much of the damage had already been done. As asylum cases piled up and
snakeheads like Sister Ping grew their businesses, Keefe writes, "the INS
was cash-strapped and plodding, hidebound and slavishly hierarchical . . .
The agency was the exact opposite of the snakeheads . . . It was a domestic
law-enforcement agency striving for relevance in a world of global
migration flows." Globalization had a dark side, and the U.S. was slow to
catch on.
Quantcast
In 1992, after a crackdown on corruption in the Bangkok airport (where
snakeheads procured fake documents), the smugglers turned to boats, or what
was known as the "bucket business." Most ships were barely seaworthy; some
had as many as a hundred cabins and packed the bodies in. Routes were
byzantine: the FBI tracked one group of migrants from Fuzhou to Hong Kong,
Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Dubai, Frankfurt, and then Washington.
Keefe puts it this way: "In the minds of the snakeheads, humans were
ultimately a form of cargo like any other, subject to the economies of
scale." Like the global trade in more ordinary goods, shipping on the sea
worked, leaving U.S. authorities in its wake for quite a while.
The chief complaint against Keefe's book is simple: no pictures. It almost
seems absurd to ask for more from such a rigorously researched account, but
the portrait Keefe paints of Ping leaves the reader repeatedly flipping
through the pages for an actual picture. An eight-page photo spread is the
only thing that could make this book even more worth the $30.
Ping was eventually arrested, and in 2005, she appeared before a judge in
lower Manhattan. Keefe points out, "There was a measure of cruel irony in
the location," seeing as the courthouse was just a stone's throw away from
the Chinatown neighborhood from which she operated her empire. That
observation, like much of Keefe's book, underscores the ultimately
inexcusable and heartbreaking failure of the U.S. government to craft a
realistic and workable immigration policy, one that would either
accommodate or stem the relentless flow of humans desperate to live in the
U.S. Without such a policy, the market assumed control. As it was in the
1990s, as it still is today, and as The Snakehead vividly demonstrates, the
market lacks morals.
© 2009
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