Regional Outlook : Chinese Refugees Take to High Seas : Emigrants pay up to $30,000 to criminal syndicates that pack them into boats, the INS says. Numbers are small but growing.

When U.S. Coast Guard officials first boarded the cargo ship East Wood in the middle of the Pacific in early February, they found 524 Chinese hoping to come to America jammed into the hold and on the deck of a filthy, unseaworthy vessel.

After several weeks spent in limbo in the Marshall Islands, the would-be emigrants were flown back to China. And the compelling saga of the East Wood came to a close.

But the phenomenon of which the East Wood was the latest and most disturbing example--the apparently organized effort to smuggle cargoes of Chinese by boat from the Asian mainland to the United States--is continuing and growing.

U.S. authorities, from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Coast Guard and the State Department, are becoming increasingly concerned about the recent upsurge in illegal immigration by Chinese “boat people.” And they are gradually starting to devote new efforts to combat the smuggling rings.

According to U.S. officials, the passengers on the East Wood, virtually all of them from China’s Fujian province, had paid up to $30,000 to criminal syndicates to smuggle them by boat to America. So far as is known, the Chinese on the East Wood were the largest shipment yet in the increasingly lucrative business of transporting human cargoes out of China.

“If this is an indication of things to come, we’ve got a major problem on our hands,” says Rear Adm. William C. Donnell, commander of the 14th Coast Guard District in Honolulu.

In Washington, John F. Shaw, the INS’ assistant commissioner for investigations, observes that when U.S. authorities first detected the oceangoing smuggling operations two years ago, each boat was relatively small, carrying fewer than 100 Chinese at a time. Now, he says, the smuggling rings “are using larger and larger boats and putting more and more people on them.”

The number and variety of routes the boats have taken from China to America are breathtaking.

Over the last two years, fishing trawlers have been found unloading their Chinese passengers not only in the coastal waters off California and Hawaii, but even at East Coast locations off the shores of North Carolina and Massachusetts.

Authorities have discovered other vessels carrying Chinese emigrants bound for the United States in Japan, Singapore, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and the African countries of Mauritius and Kenya. And American officials believe there are more boats already outfitted in Asia and preparing to transport more human cargoes from China.

Generally, the smuggling boats avoid coming inside U.S. coastal waters, which extend to 200 miles beyond the shoreline. Instead, they remain on the high seas, safely outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement officials, and hire smaller boats to ferry the Chinese to American shores.

“The whole object is to offload in international waters,” says the INS’ Shaw. “Normally, they contract with people in the United States to do the offloading. The prices are around $1,000 a head. They’ve used Vietnamese crews, everyone.” If caught, the hired hands face penalties of up to five years in prison for illegal smuggling of foreigners.

The departures by ship from China invite comparisons with the Indochinese “boat people” who fled Vietnam and Cambodia in the years after the 1975 Communist takeovers of the two countries. But the Indochinese fled in small boats, family by family, in a mass exodus whose numbers reached the hundreds of thousands. The Chinese are leaving in smaller numbers, using larger ships.

And in contrast with the Indochinese boat people, the Chinese smuggling operations are, Shaw and other U.S. authorities believe, highly organized criminal affairs, the work of rings whose international activities extend from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore to the United States and other countries.

“This takes a very involved network,” says Wayne R. McKenna, an INS senior special agent for investigations. “It takes recruiters in China, other people to move aliens from the Chinese interior to the coast, and others to ferry them out to vessels off the Chinese shoreline.

“It takes people to get a boat and provisions and a crew. It takes people at ports around the world to take care of things like refueling and engine problems. There have to be people to help out the Chinese when they reach the United States. And most importantly of all, the money has to be collected, and the only way to collect the money is through muscle and intimidation, both in the United States and in China.”

For organized crime, the potential profits that can be made from smuggling people are huge.

The math is simple. A ship the size of the East Wood, carrying about 500 Chinese paying an average of $20,000 apiece to get to the United States, would take in gross revenues of $10 million.

Some of the Chinese get or borrow money from relatives in America or elsewhere overseas, authorities say. But whenever those Chinese who have been smuggled into the United States can’t make their payments, they become a ready supply of labor that can be put to work in restaurants, laundries or even drug-dealing and prostitution.

“They live as indentured servants, paying off their debt,” says Vern Jervis, a spokesman for the INS. “ . . . We have found instances where they are virtually held as prisoner.”

Some U.S. officials believe that organized crime groups that were previously involved in importing drugs have now converted to smuggling Chinese as a way of earning comparably large sums of money.

“The information strongly suggests that organizations already established for the smuggling of narcotics are now using their ships to transport human cargo,” Shaw maintains.

How many Chinese have been smuggled into the United States? The figures are sketchy.

INS officials say that they have caught only a relatively small number of Chinese, about 1,800, trying to come here by boat over the last two years. But they believe that many other boats have succeeded in landing, dropping off thousands more Chinese, without being detected.

In addition, at least another 1,000 Chinese--believed ultimately destined for the United States--have been intercepted in foreign ports.

Overall, INS and State Department officials estimate, about 100,000 Chinese are illegally entering the United States--by all means of transport--each year. And these numbers are growing.

Those figures far exceed the numbers of Chinese--approximately 28,000 to 32,000 a year--who immigrate legally into the United States. However, they are small in comparison with the levels of illegal immigration from Mexico. INS officials say they apprehend about 1 million people a year trying to cross the Mexican border into the United States, and they have no numbers for the people who cross without being caught.

The levels of illegal Chinese immigration have revived the old specter raised 14 years ago by China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

While on a 1979 visit to Washington, Deng asked Jimmy Carter Administration officials to grant China most-favored-nation trade benefits. He was told that, under an American law first written with Soviet Jews in mind, China would have to guarantee freedom of emigration from its soil.

“Sure, how many Chinese do you want?” Deng replied. “One million? Two million?”

Now, at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, INS officials apprehend about 15,000 inadmissible foreigners a year--and these days, more of them come from China than from any other country. INS officials at the airport find about 360 Chinese a month, or more than 4,000 a year, trying to enter the United States without visas or other documents.

William Slattery, INS New York district director, admits that the system is swamped to the point of breakdown. “I only have 100 beds to detain inadmissible aliens in a given day. Only 7% of all inadmissible aliens are detained. That means people know they’ve got a 93% chance of walking right through into the United States.”

Those who aren’t detained are processed, fingerprinted--and then let go, with instructions to appear for an immigration hearing later on. “It takes us 18 months to start a hearing before an immigration judge,” Slattery sighs. “That means that the people who we catch at the airport this week will come up for hearings in September, 1994.”

Moreover, about three-quarters of the Chinese make special legal claims for political asylum, further delaying any possible deportation.

A special executive order signed in April, 1990, after the Tian An Men Square crackdown, protects Chinese from being sent back home if they were in the United States before that time, or if they are afraid of China’s strict abortion and sterilization policies.

U.S. immigration officials say one of the main reasons for the upsurge in boat smuggling is that those who arrive here safely by ship avoid any record of their arrivals and can later claim they arrived in the United States before the 1990 executive order. Those who come through airports, by contrast, risk eventual deportation, because the INS has paperwork proving the date of their arrival.

An astonishingly high proportion of those caught, both on the boats and at the airports, come from China’s Fujian Province. That is the province along China’s southeastern coastline that has, for centuries, been the primary source of emigration to Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries and (along with neighboring Guangdong Province) to the United States.

“It (Fujian) has traditionally been a migratory part of China. Leaving for overseas is a way of life there,” says McKenna of the INS.

It helps too that some of the organized smuggling rings themselves have members in or connections to Fujian.

“We did the background investigation of the East Wood case, and as far as we are aware, there was a bit of a Chinese connection in New York, which the Americans call the Fukian (Fujian) gang,” Albert Kwok, who heads the organized crime and Triad (underground Chinese gang) bureau for the Royal Hong Kong Police, told The Times.”

Those Chinese who want to try the illegal sea route to America are generally shuttled onto boats stationed just off the coast of Fujian.

But a popular staging and transit point for the illegal traffic is Hong Kong, which is the biggest, busiest port on the Asian mainland.

In 1991, some 129,300 oceangoing ships and river-trade vessels called at Hong Kong, where authorities are empowered to board ships. Tony Miller, director of the Hong Kong marine department, admits: “With so many ships coming into Hong Kong every year, it is impossible for us to check all of them.”

Occasionally, however, officials on harbor patrol deny port clearance to a boat and require it to stay in Hong Kong when they see signs of what could be a smuggling operation.

One such boat is the Sea Raider, a Philippine-flagged ship that has been stranded in Hong Kong for more than a year. The Sea Raider’s hold is oddly equipped with hundreds of rusting bed frames and scores of life jackets. On deck, it has three containers filled with bags of “747” brand rice, Styrofoam lunch boxes, mugs and foam mattresses.

“It would take the Sea Raider, which is a very run-down ship, three weeks to arrive on the West Coast of America,” says Father Joseph Nijssen, the chaplain of the Hong Kong Mariners’ Club. Miller says that until Hong Kong officials get full information about the ownership of the Sea Raider and are satisfied with its condition, it won’t get clearance to leave the port.

The American efforts to combat the Chinese smuggling operations have been hampered by some bureaucratic wrangling. The problems have been particularly acute in the immigration service, where agents in several field offices have complained that INS headquarters in Washington isn’t doing enough about the Chinese smuggling operations.

“They (the Chinese boat people) are on the upswing, and it’s something that INS should start planning for and getting some operations and programs for,” says David Ilchert, the INS’ district director in San Francisco. “My feeling is that it’s like the Haitians on the East Coast. The only difference is the expansiveness of the Pacific Ocean.”

In Washington, Shaw bristles at the complaints from field offices. He says he has just assigned a total of 16 new INS agents in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Honolulu and Boston district offices to investigate Chinese boat smuggling operations, and that he has allocated an additional $2 million for use by a special new Chinese boat task force within INS.

“There is a plan,” Shaw says. “There is a Chinese boat task force. But the problem goes beyond the bounds of an enforcement solution.”

Some of the law enforcement efforts are beginning to pay off.

In New York City last week, the Justice Department for the first time obtained the convictions of two boat owners for conspiring to smuggle Chinese into the United States.

The two men, George Huang and William Chen, who formerly owned restaurants in New York City, were found to have purchased a fishing boat called the Chin Wing 18 in Taiwan. Evidence at the trial showed that last year, the Chin Wing picked up 151 Chinese from the mainland and, for fees of up to $30,000 apiece, promised to smuggle them into the United States.

Over a period of more than four months, the Chin Wing carried its 151 passengers from the waters off China to Mauritius, South Africa and Haiti before it was intercepted off the coast of North Carolina last September.

Immigration and State Department officials are also pleased with their success in having the Chinese aboard the East Wood flown back to China.

After the Coast Guard boarded the Panamanian-flagged East Wood Feb. 3, the ship was escorted to Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the ship’s 524 passengers were held and fed on an American military base.

U.S. officials asked a number of Asian governments to take the refugees there for processing. “Basically, they all said no,” admits a State Department official.

Finally, the United States worked out a deal with China to take back the people who had fled its soil. State Department officials say they got assurances that once returned, the Chinese from the East Wood would be treated fairly and not punished.

U.S. officials hope the return of the East Wood will send the message that the Chinese boat smuggling operations don’t always succeed. But they acknowledge that every effort to catch a ship full of Chinese and send them home is difficult and expensive. The INS estimates that each individual anti-smuggling operation costs as much as $125,000.

Rising Tide

About 1,800 would-be Chinese emigrants have been seized at sea or been spotted of the U.S. or its territories since 1991. Here are the major incidents:

* Incident: Aug. 31, 1991. Los Angeles.

Ship: I-Mao No. 306

Type: Taiwanese fishing trawler

Chinese aboard: 131

*

* Incident: Feb. 17, 1992. Honolulu.

Ship: Yun Fong Song No. 303

Type: Taiwanese fishing trawler

Chinese aboard: 93

*

* Incident: Feb. 22, 1992. Honolulu.

Ship: Fa Shiann Jee

Type: Taiwanese fishing trawler

Chinese aboard: 51

*

* Incident: Feb. 23, 1992. Los Angeles.

Ships: San Tai No. 1 and Liberated Lady

Type: Taiwanese fishing trawler and American yacht

Chinese aboard: 85

*

* Incident: June 18, 1992. Honolulu.

Ship: Lucky No. 1

Type: Freighter registered in Belize

Chinese aboard: 119

*

Incident: Sept. 12, 1992. Long Beach.

Ships: Hong Zang 6824 and New Star

Type: Taiwanese fishing trawler and American ferry

Chinese aboard: 160

*

* Incident: Sept. 17, 1992. Honolulu.

Ships: Go-Get-Em and Eing Dong Ming

Type: Vietnamese and Taiwanese fishing vessels

Chinese aboard: 137

*

* Incident: Sept. 22, 1992. New Bedford, Mass.

Ship: Luen Hing

Type: Shrimp boat based in Bayou La Batre, Alabama.

Chinese aboard: 150

*

* Incident: Dec. 22, 1992. San Francisco

Ship: Manyoshi Maru

Type: Taiwanese freighter

Chinese aboard: 180

*

* Incident: Feb. 3, 1993. Pacific Ocean, near Marshall Islands.

Ship: East Wood

Type: Cargo ship

Chinese aboard: 524

CLOSE-UP: THE VOYAGE OF THE CHIN WING 18

Route:

April, 1992: Leaves Kee Lung, Taiwan. Arrives off Fujian Province and loads 151 refugees brought by speedboat from mainland.

May 22, 1992: Arrives Port Louis, Mauritius

May 28: Leaves Port Louis, Mauritius, after being refueled, reprovisioned

July 9: Arrives Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Receives spare parts.

Aug. 16: Arrives Jacmel, Haiti. Seized by Haiti.

Sept 1: Released by Haiti.

Sept. 7: Seized by Coast Guard off Morehead City, N.C., after developing engine trouble.

Epilogue:

March 9, 1993: Boat owners George Huang and William Chen convicted in New York of conspiring to smuggle illegal aliens.