Global Issues
BOOKS-US: The (Not So) Invisible Ones
People try to illegally enter foreign countries for many different reasons, and in many different ways. But they all have something in common - they are largely 'invisible' to authorities and the media.
That was not the case with the ship called the Golden Venture, which sailed from China in 1993 with 286 Chinese migrants aboard and ran aground on a beach in the New York City borough of Queens. Ten drowned attempting to swim to shore, and while a few were eventually granted asylum in the United States, most were deported back to China.
That dramatic event is the core of the newly released book 'The Snakehead' (a nickname for human smugglers) by Patrick Radden Keefe, as well as the 2006 documentary 'Golden Venture' written, produced and directed by Peter Cohn, creator of the acclaimed documentary on alcoholism, 'Drunks'.
The two appeared at a recent presentation hosted by the Century Foundation in New York called 'From China to Chinatown', where they discussed the case of the Golden Venture, as well as the prospects for immigration reform in the United States.
Keefe and Cohn had never met before starting their research, but while the titles of the two projects are different, the essential story and its main character is the same: the huge human trafficking ring run by Sister Ping, described by Keefe as 'the mother of all snakeheads', during the 1980s and the early 1990s.
Cheng Chui Ping, a.k.a. Ping Jia ('Sister' Ping), was a Chinese woman living in the lower Manhattan neighbourhood of Chinatown, where she ran a souvenir shop and restaurant. Ping soon realised that she could earn a lot more money helping people come to the U.S. illegally, on the 'adventurous' boat trips she organised.
In his four years of research, Keefe - whose focus is international security and globalised crime, and who travelled to China several times for the book - determined that Ping must have earned in the realm of 40 million dollars from her international trafficking operation.
Ping was sentenced to 35 years in a U.S. prison in March 2006, but is still considered a hero by many of her compatriots for helping thousands find a new life in North America.
Keefe told IPS that his personal views about immigration evolved during the investigation. 'In a vacuum, it's easy to draw draconian conclusions about how immigrants who come here illegally should be treated and how much of a hard line our immigration policies should draw,' he said.
'But when you actually spend time with these immigrants and come to appreciate the extraordinary sacrifices that they made in order to be here - risking their lives multiple times, going into debt, and then getting here and living the precarious existence of an illegal immigrant it's hard not to develop some empathy, and even respect, for what they have undertaken,' he said.
'I came out of the process of writing the book adamantly anti-human smuggler, but relatively pro-immigrant,' he added.
The Chinese migrants on the Golden Venture, most hailing from Fujian province (the Fujianese are considered especially tenacious in Chinese culture), were so determined to come to the U.S. that they bypassed both Africa and Europe to reach North America's east coast.
This is the driving force behind the migration phenomenon: the dream of a better life.
'We are not talking about criminals here,' Keefe said. 'These people are ready to sacrifice everything they have including their own lives to get to a place they consider worth it.'
The entwined issues of migration and human trafficking have assumed new poignancy and momentum in the U.S. with the election of a president, Barack Obama, who is himself the son of an immigrant from Kenya.
'The Obama administration has committed to comprehensive immigration reform, though healthcare and other legislative priorities have delayed this initiative to some extent,' Keefe explained.
'The trick for Obama and the congressional proponents of immigration reform will be crafting legislation that seeks to normalise the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States by putting them on a 'path to citizenship', without inadvertently sending a message to future undocumented migrants that if they too undertake the journey they might be rewarded with citizenship once they arrive,' he said.
'That's an extremely difficult tightrope for policymakers to walk. I'm encouraged, though, that so far the Obama administration has endeavored to penalise the smugglers and employers more often than the undocumented migrants themselves,' the author told IPS.
Asked what role international bodies like the United Nations can play, Keefe said, 'The U.N. is uniquely positioned to deal with issues of global migration, refugee policy, human smuggling, and human trafficking, and so far as it goes, the work that the U.N. has done over the years has been laudable.'
'But there is always more work to be done, and the issues that tend to bedevil these situations - a shortage of resources, a lack of political will, a not-in-my-backyard attitude - are all present here as well,' he told IPS.
In the end, he believes migration is as much or more - a humanitarian issue than a political one.
'I think that with regard to the people being smuggled, it should be viewed as a humanitarian issue. Politics tends to corrupt any conversation about immigration, because politicians have a tendency to stir up xenophobia and fear in a way that often becomes both irrational and cruel,' Keefe said.
Despite the formidable obstacles and terrible risks, including death which claimed nearly a dozen of those aboard the Golden Venture the International Organisation for Migration estimates that more than 200 million people in the world today have crossed borders in the hope of improving their lives.
The number of migrants worldwide would constitute the fifth most populous country on the planet, according to World Bank figures.
'By every indication, immigrants are continuing to risk their lives to be smuggled into developed countries, even countries in which tough-on-immigrants political parties are assuming a greater share of power,' Keefe said.
'Transnational smuggling networks are extremely sophisticated and adaptable, so even when individual countries endeavor to make illegal immigration more difficult, the smugglers generally find some way to route around whatever border enforcements the countries establish,' he concluded.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service