U.S. Reports Growing Trend : Illegal Border Crossings by Non-Latinos on Rise

In January, 1985, Dong Chan Kim had a rendezvous in this border town. Dong, a Korean native who was living legally in Los Angeles, met four South Koreans who arrived at the Tijuana airport from Mexico City. Afterward, Dong and his son-in-law drove the visitors in a 1966 maroon Mustang convertible to a fancy downtown restaurant, where U.S. authorities say the four newcomers passed Dong an envelope containing $5,600.

The following day, U.S. border authorities arrested the four Koreans as they attempted to enter the United States illegally through a rugged Tijuana canyon. During questioning, they soon fingered Dong as their smuggling contact, the man who had helped arrange the deal during a meeting three weeks earlier and thousands of miles away in a hotel in Seoul, South Korea.

U.S. authorities say Dong’s case represents a trend: increasingly, illegal immigrants from far-flung nations such as South Korea, Yugoslavia, Poland, India and Ghana are following the well-blazed trail of aliens from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America who attempt to enter the United States illegally by crossing its 1,900-mile border with Mexico. For these immigrants, as for tens of thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans, the United States represents a chance at a better life, an escape from poverty and repression.

In the first four months of the current fiscal year, for example, immigration authorities in San Diego, the nation’s busiest border crossing, arrested 52 Yugoslavians, 41 Indians, 16 South Koreans, 8 Poles and 8 Chinese.

While the numbers are but fractions of the multitude of illegal Mexican aliens, U.S. officials are nonetheless concerned, particularly since language and cultural barriers make investigations difficult and prosecutions costly.

“Trying to find a court-approved Albanian translator can be a mammoth undertaking,” one federal prosecutor noted.

“It’s a lot more difficult to infiltrate or break up a smuggling ring in Yugoslavia, as opposed to something that’s local,” said John Belluardo, director of congressional and public affairs for the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s regional office in Los Angeles. “And even if we infiltrate two or three a week, there are probably two dozen still operating. These are million-dollar operations. . . . The United States is becoming the lifeboat for the rest of the world.”

One INS investigator said: “We can break up four Mexican rings in the time it takes to crack one of these Yugoslavian cases.”

Moreover, whereas Mexican nationals are routinely bused back to Mexico after signing voluntary departure forms, non-Mexicans, who cannot be deported to Mexico, must be held--at government expense--until their deportation cases are heard or until they post bond.

“There’s a tremendous expense involved here,” said Harold Ezell, INS commissioner for the western region.

During recent investigations of smuggling rings, INS officials have learned of sophisticated networks of airline routes, safe houses, preferred hotels, guides, couriers and back roads stretching from Europe, Asia, the Mideast and Africa to Mexican border cities and into the United States.

With legal visas to the United States in short supply, the porous barrier that is the U.S.-Mexico border is often the easiest path to the United States. And U.S. authorities say that Mexico, with its liberal policy for visitors’ visas and its well-known reputation for corruption, is a convenient conduit for smuggling people of all nationalities into the United States. Officials expect to see more and more aliens from all nations attempting to enter the United States through Mexico.

“The word has gone out to the rest of the world that the United States . . . that there are jobs available,” said Ed Pyeatt, a supervisory agent of the U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego. “It’s the age of mass communications, satellites. . . . They see how good it is here on American TV. . . . Then one person comes and sends word back home how good it is, and another person comes and then another. . . . There’s a blossoming effect.”

What they seek is nothing less than the American dream, and their point of embarkation is not Ellis Island but Tijuana.

“Their basic motivations are on the Statue of Liberty--they’re tired, hungry and yearning to be free,” said Robert Mautino, an attorney in San Diego who handles immigration cases. “Unfortunately, if you fit that description, you probably can’t emigrate legally to the United States.”

Once considered a border oddity, non-Latino illegal aliens are now being picked up at border outposts as varied as the rugged mountain terrain of Texas’ Big Bend, the flat desert of Arizona and the sprawling metropolis of San Diego. Like many Latin Americans, these newest aliens travel enormous distances--often at considerable personal danger--and pay exorbitant sums--up to $10,000, investigators say--to often unscrupulous smugglers.

Many of these non-Latino immigrants plan to join relatives in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where they blend in with local ethnic communities and are unlikely to be apprehended. Often, though, they end up abandoned by smugglers who prey on their naivete or imprisoned by U.S. authorities in the strange environs of the border.

“They (the smugglers) took everything I had,” said Lord Emmanuel Smith, 25, of Ghana. He was arrested in December along with a group of Mexicans who were trying to enter the United States illegally in the border town of Calexico. The smugglers kept most of his money and his passport, Smith said.

“I was thinking of visiting my cousin in Houston,” the lanky Smith said during an interview at the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facility in El Centro. “I didn’t think this would be such a serious case. In West Africa, you can visit neighboring countries without a passport. . . . I thought it would be the same kind of system here.”

The increased smuggling of non-Latinos from Mexico, which authorities say dates from the early 1980s, has resulted in some cultural paradoxes.

In Mexican border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, cheap hotels have been playing temporary hosts to groups of these newest tourists, Eastern Europeans and Asians who speak no Spanish or English and are there strictly to seek illegal entry into the United States. In largely Latino areas of the U.S. border region, authorities have seized vehicles transporting groups of oddly dressed foreigners along isolated back roads.

And all along the border, U.S. immigration authorities long accustomed to dealing with Mexicans and other Latin Americans have schooled themselves in such suddenly useful esoterica as the cultural nuances of the turbaned Sikhs of the Punjab or the historical roots of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Albanians--many of whom previously had fled Albania, Europe’s most dogmatic Communist nation.

“We’ve had to educate ourselves,” said Gerald S. Marchese, a Border Patrol investigator based in San Diego who has helped break smuggling rings of South Koreans and Yugoslavs. “When we first starting seeing these Yugoslavs a few years ago, they looked like your classic KGB men, all dressed up in these black suits with little stripes. Just like you’d see in a spy movie. . . . Some of these Albanians talked about how they risked their lives, crawled on their bellies under the barbed wire, just to get out of Albania.”

An El Paso immigration lawyer recalled seeing a pair of Eastern Europeans in an immigration detention facility filled with Latin Americans.

“You had to feel sorry for these guys,” the lawyer said. “They were so out of place. They were all dressed up in these loud clothes, and they didn’t speak English or Spanish.”

In fiscal 1985, U.S. immigration authorities along the southern border recorded apprehending more than 1.2 million aliens from more than 70 nations. The vast majority--97%--were Mexican nationals. However, the 40,500 non-Mexican nationals apprehended--mostly Central Americans--represented an increase of 13% from the year before.

For non-Latino aliens, the increase appears to be even sharper, although the INS does not break it down on a national basis. In San Diego, immigration officials apprehended 782 aliens from non-Latino nations in fiscal 1985--a 90% increase from the previous year.

Apart from the difficulty and increased costs associated with investigating non-Latino smuggling rings, officials voice some concern that illegal entrants who are members of politically active groups could become involved in criminal activities in the United States. Officials said the issue was raised during the investigation of a ring that was allegedly smuggling hundreds of Yugoslav nationals through Mexico during the early 1980s. Most of the aliens were young, single men of ethnic Albanian heritage who “have very active political affiliations,” according to a government sentencing memorandum.

“It was right around the time that we had the Olympics in Los Angeles, and we were concerned there could be some kind of incident,” said Pamela J. Naughton, an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego who helped prosecute the Yugoslav case.

Defense attorneys, however, maintained that the smuggled aliens were mostly poor ethnic Albanians who were fleeing discrimination and poverty in Yugoslavia. Indeed, many non-Latino aliens do file for political asylum in the United States, although such applications are granted infrequently.

The Yugoslav case, one of the broadest East European smuggling operations uncovered in recent years, centered on Dragisa (Dragan) Terzioski, a Yugoslav-born naturalized U.S. citizen who allegedly ran his smuggling operation from his travel agency in Paterson, N.J., a working-class city west of New York with a substantial Yugoslav-American population. Terzioski was a prominent member of the area’s Yugoslav community, host of a weekly television program and a media commentator during U.S. visits by Josip Broz Tito, the late Yugoslav leader.

When Terzioski was arrested in May, 1984, and bail was set at $1 million, federal prosecutors charged in court papers that “it was only a matter of days before one of his countrymen appeared at the Magistrate’s office with a plastic bag full of $100,000 in cash” to bail him out. The funds were collected from Yugoslav-Americans whose relatives had been smuggled into the United States with Terzioski’s help, according to the government sentencing memorandum.

Federal authorities charged that Terzioski was becoming rich on profits garnered by smuggling Yugoslav citizens into the United States via Mexico. Most were ethnic Albanians seeking to meet relatives in the New York-New Jersey area.

Terzioski’s network was well-established, according to court documents based on interviews with captured illegal aliens. Officials say its operations are similar to those of other smuggling rings now bringing in Europeans, Asians and others.

In the Terzioski case, prosecutors said that a relative of the alien to be smuggled would first contact Terzioski at his travel agency. Terzioski would insist on being paid an average of $4,000 in cash. The smuggler would then arrange to have Mexican visas issued to the aliens in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Shortly thereafter, the government charged, the aliens would fly from Belgrade to Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam to Mexico City, where Terzioski or one of his accomplices would meet them and arrange for their transportation to Mexican border cities such as Tijuana. A guide would accompany the illegal immigrants across the border, and the aliens would be put on a plane in San Diego bound for New York or New Jersey.

Federal prosecutors believe that Terzioski helped hundreds of citizens of Yugoslavia to enter the United States illegally. In the nine-month period beginning in September, 1983, prosecutors estimated in court papers, Terzioski garnered more than $300,000 in illicit profits for smuggling in 135 aliens from Yugoslavia.

Unknown to Terzioski, his prosperous enterprise began to unravel in the fall of 1983, when immigration officers intercepted four Yugoslavs being smuggled in from Tijuana. An American driver told investigators that he had been recruited by a man known only as Dragan.

Through telephone records, airline ticket receipts and interviews with other smuggled Yugoslavs, Dragan was soon identified as Terzioski and traced to his New Jersey travel agency. In October, 1984, Terzioski pleaded guilty to two smuggling counts; he was sentenced to four years in jail. Five other accomplices also pleaded guilty and received varying sentences.

But, apart from Europeans, U.S. immigration authorities say they have found increasing evidence of Asian smuggling rings bringing in aliens through Mexico. The recent Korean-smuggling case heard in U.S. District Court in San Diego had its origins in a meeting on Jan. 2, 1985, at the New International Hotel in Seoul.

During the meeting, according to court documents, four South Koreans seeking entry into the United States met with a man identified only as “Mr. Chon” and another man identified as Dong Chan Kim, a naturalized U.S. citizen who ran an import-export business in Los Angeles. (Dong later pleaded guilty to one smuggling count and is now serving a six-month jail term imposed by a federal judge last month.) The two men informed the four Koreans of an alternative route into the United States--through Mexico.

In a later interview with investigators, Hee Woong Park, one of the Koreans who desired to come to the United States, recalled how the issue of Mexico first arose.

“Mr. Chon told me if it is very hard to get American visa . . . then there is another way to enter U.S., to enter Mexico, and . . . from Mexico I can enter to U.S.,” Hee said through an interpreter, according to court documents.

The group was told that Dong would meet them at the airport in Tijuana, court records show. They were also led to believe that they would be issued some kind of documentation allowing them to pass U.S. immigration checkpoints, according to court papers.

The four paid $1,700 each; they paid their own air fares and travel expenses. Their route took them from Seoul to Tokyo to Vancouver and on to Mexico City, where they stayed at the Plaza Madrid Hotel--a common stopping-off point for aliens seeking to enter the United States, according to federal officials. On Jan. 22, 1985, they flew from Mexico City to Tijuana International Airport, where they were met by Dong and an accomplice and driven to a restaurant. There, Dong was allegedly handed an envelope with $5,600 in it. The men were later taken to two separate “safe houses” in Tijuana, according to court records.

The four were issued no valid documentation, as promised. On the morning after their arrival, a guide attempted to transport them from Tijuana into the United States. They were all arrested, and probably will be deported.

A similar fate--deportation--awaits Manuel Cesar Almarza Gonzalez, 25, a Spaniard who slipped into the United States in December at Tijuana and was arrested last month in Live Oak, Calif., where he had been working as a gardener. Almarza Gonzalez, like many illegal immigrants who are apprehended and jailed, has been disenchanted by his brief stay in the United States, and he says he has no desire to return once he is sent back to Spain.

“I really don’t want to come back to the United States,” Almarza said during an interview at the immigration detention center in El Centro. “At least back in Spain you can walk down the street without worrying about being stopped by the police, or you can sit in a bar without anyone bothering you. Life is hard in the United States.”