BANGKOK - For Chinese
migrants, obtaining a genuine passport and
settling into far-flung countries like Papua New
Guinea, Tonga, the Marshall Islands, Myanmar or
even Russia is not especially difficult. But if a
Chinese wants to migrate illegally to the United
States or Europe, where visa restrictions and
immigration controls are much
tighter, the procedure is far more complicated -
and expensive.
Unlike the 1980s and early
1990s, when many a Chinese migrant undertook risky
journeys hidden in the hulls of dilapidated ships
and freighters, nowadays more and more Chinese
migrants are taking to the skies to emigrate from
China. The recent explosion in low-cost aviation
and global tourism has provided new easy routes to
Western destinations.
And despite China's
recent economic rise, millions of Chinese are just
as keen now as they were two decades ago to escape
the motherland for a hoped for better life in the
US or European Union - much to Western immigration
authorities' chagrin.
The first stopover
on the long road to jinshan - or "the
mountain of gold", as the Chinese often refer to
America - is usually Bangkok. Any Chinese national
can get a visa-on-arrival stamped into their
passports for a 30-day tourism stay in Thailand.
After leaving Thailand on their legitimate Chinese
passports, they often use doctored or false
Singaporean or Japanese passports while in transit
in Tokyo to take advantage of those two countries'
visa waiver program with the US and free entry to
the EU.
Fake travel documents are easily
obtained - albeit often for a steep price - at
several shops in Bangkok's gritty Lard Prao
district. According to trafficking experts, Lad
Prao is a regional hub for forging passports and
visas. These forgeries may not always be good
enough to fool immigration officials at airports.
But they usually are for airline employees who
only check whether the name on the passport
matches that on the ticket when a passenger
actually boards the plane. And, in any case, they
lack the technology and know-how immigration
officials employ to identify false travel
documents.
In other cases, a stolen
passport may be matched up with a prospective
illegal migrant who bears some reasonable likeness
to the picture of the original owner, thus
completely obviating the risk of altering the
document. "There is anecdotal evidence to suggest
that some illegal migrants have even undergone
plastic surgery in Bangkok to ensure a closer
resemblance to the original photograph in a stolen
document," says Tony Davis, a writer for the
monthly Jane's Intelligence Review.
According to trafficking experts, it often
works like this. A potential Chinese migrant can,
for instance, leave Beijing for Bangkok on his or
her Chinese passport using a round-trip ticket
with an airline that has a layover in Tokyo on the
return trip. They may enter Thailand on a
visa-on-arrival arrangement, pick up a false
Japanese passport while in Bangkok, but then check
in for his or her flight back to Beijing via Tokyo
using their original Chinese passport.
Then, In the transit lounge at Narita
airport, he or she will be met by a member of a
trafficking gang who will hand him a boarding pass
with the same, or similar, name as in his false
Japanese passport headed for the US or EU. The
gang member has checked in using a passport with
the same name on a flight to the United States,
and another flight as well for himself.
The migrant then discards his or her
Chinese passport at Narita and boards a plane for
a Western destination using his false Japanese
passport and a genuine boarding pass for that
flight. It usually works because attendants at the
gates from the actual airlines generally only make
sure that the names are the same on both
documents.
While in flight, the migrant
tosses his false passport and the boarding pass in
the airplane toilet and then applies for political
asylum on landing in the US or EU. All
applications for asylum must be considered by
Western courts, and carrying a false passport
supplied by human trafficking gangs seldom helps
migrants' win their cases.
On the final
leg of the journey, all documentation therefore
must be destroyed to make it impossible for US
immigration officials to retrace the migrant's
journey, which hampers forced repatriation.
Price of passage The smuggling
packages sold by the gangs to migrants and others
usually include false or real passports, air
tickets and escorts who make sure the migrants
safely reach their destinations. According to
trafficking experts, the going rate for one-way
passage to the US is currently around
US$35,000-$40,000. An "informal ticket" from China
to Europe, a less popular destination, is much
cheaper at only $10,000-$15,000.
It is
also possible to sneak into the US through the
backdoors of its outlying territories. One
particularly popular destination is the
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands,
which is a US territory but with its own visa
waiver program which includes Chinese citizens.
That's because many Chinese migrants work on the
main island of Saipan, or come as tourists to
visit the casino on the nearby island of Tinian,
which is rumored by local residents to be owned by
interests close to the China's People's Liberation
Army and frequently visited by would-be illegal
migrants.
A visit pass for the Northern
Mariana Islands, however, does not entitle the
holder to travel on to any other US territories -
but Guam, an "unincorporated US territory", is
only a couple of hours away by boat. Guam is
inside the US customs and immigration area, and an
application for asylum there is usually
transferred to the US mainland. Thus, the chance
of being sent back to China is minimal.
The illegal migrants are also instructed
on what to say when applying for asylum in the
Western countries of their choice, which has made
it much more difficult to determine who is a
genuine refugee and who is taking advantage of the
1951 Refugee Convention. That doesn't mean they
are always able to stick to the script. An
American immigration official recalls interviewing
an asylum seeker from China who claimed to be a
Christian and thus feared for his life if he was
sent back to China. When the officer asked him how
Jesus died, the asylum seeker replied: "The
communists shot him with a machine-gun."
Many others have claimed to be members of
the banned Falungong movement - but failed when
asked to demonstrate how they practice
xigong's meditative pose, according
to the immigration official. Still others have
maintained that they are homosexuals, an illegal
orientation in China, even while their travel
companion girlfriends wait for them outside the
interview room, the official says. But most
Chinese are granted admission, assisted by the
growing number of US lawyers in New York and other
major American cities who specialize in assisting
asylum seekers and know the loopholes in the law.
That said, because of the growing number
of immigrants who have abused the asylum system,
those who are legitimately seeking sanctuary
abroad from political oppression at home are
finding it harder to get accepted - not only
China. But human smuggling, especially but not
exclusively of Chinese migrants, is now a
multi-billion dollar business. And the business
will only grow as long as the chances of
successful migration to the West are so high and
the penalties for getting caught so low.
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review
and is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media
Services. This series of articles is part of a
larger research project conducted with support
from the John D and Catherine T MacArthur
Foundation.
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