Riding the Snake : Packed into cargo boats and stealing onto planes, a growing wave of Chinese immigrants is entering the United States, drawn by American dreams and, increasingly, financed by Chinese mobsters.

COMING TO AMERICA

ONE DAY IN THE SUMMER OF 1991, WITHOUT WARNING OR EXPLANATION, Zhou Wei and Xiao Chen were released from an Immigration and Naturalization Service prison in Texas. They had no money, no food and no idea where they were or how to contact the relatives in New York City they had never met. And it was pouring.

The two men, both just shy of 21, were overwhelmed with joy. For the first time since setting foot on American soil six months earlier, they were neither behind bars nor in chains. They swore an oath of brotherhood, vowing to help each other steer clear of trouble, work hard and pay off their enormous debts. Then, drawing on the smattering of survival English he had learned during the yearlong odyssey through Asian jungles and jails that had led him here, Xiao Chen looked for help. He got lucky. A sympathetic cabdriver gave them a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, helped them call New York and paid for a motel room. The next morning, he drove them to the airport. Zhou Wei’s uncle, who had prepaid their tickets, picked them up in Newark and rushed them to his Chinatown restaurant in Manhattan.

But when they got there, three members of the Fuk Ching gang were waiting at a table in the corner. Somehow, they had found out that Xiao Chen and Zhou Wei, each of whom owed a $25,000 balance on their smuggling debt, had been released. The enforcers, says Xiao Chen, escorted them to a “safe” house--safe, that is for the gang--and waited for the money to be delivered.

Today, Xiao Chen (the name, like Zhou Wei, is a pseudonym), is feeling good about his prospects. After working 100-hour weeks in a Chinese takeout for two years and four months, he has almost squared his account with the relatives who paid off the “snakehead,” as smugglers are called. His petition for political asylum is pending and, in the meantime, he has a temporary work permit. He dreams, realistically, of opening his own restaurant within five years.

Zhou Wei is in a different situation. Arrested late last year, he is charged with criminal possession of a weapon in connection with a kidnaping and murder case yet to come to trial. Unable to procure the cash that day in Chinatown, he took the other option: becoming a member of the gang.

Xiao Chen and Zhou Wei, blood brothers no more, are the two faces of a multibillion-dollar trade in human cargo that originates in a small coastal region of southern China, wends its way through an ever-shifting smuggling network spanning the globe, and usually winds up, sooner or later, in a few square blocks around East Broadway in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Fuzhou area of Fujian province who have settled in the United States over the past decade are like Xiao Chen: conscientious workers building their futures with bare hands. Some are propelled by persecution in China, and thus qualify as refugees under U.S. law. Most who choose to “ride the snake,” however, are drawn by the same sirens of economic opportunity that attracted their Cantonese compatriots to California’s “gold mountain” more than a century ago.

But the same illicit traffic in human beings that is fueling a cheap-labor economic boom in Chinese-American communities across the country is also financing the rapid expansion of international Chinese crime syndicates on U.S. soil, syndicates whose stock-in-trade is heroin, credit fraud, prostitution, gambling, extortion and murder. A full report on U.S.-based Asian organized crime issued in December by a Senate subcommittee on investigations found that “every (Chinese) smuggling group examined involved Asian organized-crime figures.” This, more than the small number of immigrants who become foot soldiers in these criminal organizations, is cause for alarm. It is also one of the most urgent challenges to American law enforcement since the rise of the Italian Mafia and Colombian drug cartels.

To date, it is a challenge largely unmet. Federal and local agencies have been slow to penetrate the interlocking web of Chinese triads, tongs and gangs. The INS has failed to stem the influx of illegal Chinese immigrants or to prosecute the masterminds who sneak them into the country.

In dealing with immigrant smuggling from China, however, many of the U.S. government’s wounds are self-inflicted. Indeed, the INS, the front-line agency for all immigration matters, has been rendered virtually impotent by a confluence of factors: serious internal policy schisms, generous asylum laws that attract false claims for refugee status, budget cuts and trivial penalties for alien smuggling that embolden smugglers and discourage expensive prosecutions.

And only in April, after a crisis-response meeting in Washington of key U.S. attorneys and INS agents, was an interagency plan drawn up that adequately recognizes the crucial link between the Chinese “mafia” and what the INS calls “alien smuggling.”

There have been two spikes in smuggling from Fuzhou, a seafaring enclave with a tradition of clandestine activity that goes back 350 years and an emigrant tradition that accounts for much of Southeast Asia’s Chinese population. The first was prompted by the immigration amnesty of 1986, the other by President Bush’s executive order of April 11, 1990--nearly a year after the massacre in Beijing--which offered safe haven to Chinese who could prove that they had been living in the United States before the date of the order. After peaking at approximately 100,000 in 1991, the influx tapered off to about 25,000 last year, according to INS sources and a comprehensive private study.

But a new surge has begun since September, this time by means of a flotilla of progressively larger boats that typically unload their U.S.-bound cargo off the Pacific coast. Last month, for example, more than 300 Chinese were apprehended in Baja, but more than a third of them escaped to the United States. The rest, after pressure from Washington, were repatriated. In April, the Coast Guard captured 199 Chinese immigrants on a boat off San Diego. And just three weeks ago, a Chinese freighter disgorged hundreds more at a San Francisco pier. Many were arrested; many others got away. At least half a dozen more ships--and probably twice as many--says an INS source, are on the way.

Some in this new wave of smugglees are being apprehended--enough to overwhelm the INS’ limited detention facilities. Most, however, are getting through the law enforcement net. They may pause in safehouses in and around Los Angeles, which, says INS assistant district director Jim Hayes, “serves as a base for arranging West Coast smuggling attempts.” A few will come back to stay. But first, says Hayes, they will proceed to the epicenter of the most sophisticated and profitable human smuggling network in the world: New York City.

CHINATOWN TRANSFORMED

ON ANY GIVEN DAY, A COUPLE HUNDRED MEN HUDDLE IN AND AROUND the employment agencies in the Chinatown district populated principally by Fuzhou natives. Some have been smuggled by plane via Brazil with forged travel documents; some by boat via Mexico with no documents whatsoever. Still wearing their exhausted made-in-China suits and shoes, these are the new recruits, wok scrubbers and delivery boys vying to rotate into the bottom bracket of an expanding underground market for cheap labor.

Dirt cheap and getting cheaper. Two years ago, Xiao Chen’s first restaurant job paid $1,000 a month, plus bunk and board. Today, he’d be lucky to get $700 for the same kind of work.

Unless, that is, he was willing to go to Toledo or Buffalo or Fargo, N.D., where the wages are half again as high. About a year ago, when established Chinese communities on both coasts could no longer absorb laborers from China, the expansion, mainly in quick-serve restaurants, simply paused, then turned outward toward the rest of the vast, untapped American market. “When my clients make court appearances these days,” notes New York immigration lawyer Yee Ling Poon, “as often as not they are coming from towns in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina--you name it.”

And if not Middle America, then the inner city. The second time I met Xiao Chen, it was in a blighted swath of Bronx wasteland where he works, eats and sleeps seven days a week behind the bulletproof plexiglass of a Chinese takeout. He earns $1,300 each month--a third of it hardship pay to compensate not just for a dangerous environment but also for the isolation. Two other takeout restaurants within walking distance--owned by the same entrepreneur, himself a smugglee, class of ‘86--are the inhabitable islands of Xiao Chen’s world.

Besides restaurants and sweatshop garment factories, the smuggling trade has spawned a flourishing service industry as well. Much of it is concentrated in a single, seven-story building near the Chinatown Public Library: travel and employment agencies, real estate brokers, immigration lawyers and village associations--almost all of them connected in some way to the smuggling business. Then there are the fuwu gongsi (“service companies”), some of which help smugglees apply for asylum or protection under the 1990 executive order, while others, according to Chinatown sources, specialize in procuring the forged documents that often support such claims.

The influx of new immigrants has pushed the district’s borders into territory that is historically Cantonese, as well as into areas where Hebrew, Spanish and English retail signs are giving way for the first time to Chinese. The increase in density is equally obvious, from the Eldridge Street walk-ups where men sleep in shifts in windowless cubicles stacked with bunk beds, to rising rental rates in an otherwise listless real estate market.

Obvious, but statistically deceptive. According to Census data, Manhattan’s Chinese population grew by only 37%, to 71,723, from 1980 to 1990. By contrast, Census figures show that the Chinatowns of Brooklyn and Queens grew by 161% and 119% (to 68,191 and 86,885), respectively, during that time.

Presiding over much of the clandestine growth is the Fukien American Assn., the most powerful tong--a cross between an expatriate Chamber of Commerce and a brotherhood--in the Fuzhou community. Most of the association’s 20,000 members are legitimate businessmen. But some, especially more senior ones, apparently are not.

“We know for certain that F.A.A. officers are involved in alien smuggling and (fake) document selling,” says Bruce Nicholl, coordinator of the INS’ violent gang task force. Nor is there any doubt, says Nicholl, that one of the association’s “offshoots” is the ultra-violent Fuk Ching, a street gang heavily involved in heroin smuggling and debt collection.

Officials point, in particular, to a December, 1990, kidnaping, when Fuk Ching members--after chaining the victim to a bed and beating him with hammers--called his relatives and demanded that $50,000 in cash be delivered to the F.A.A.’s headquarters. “Give it to the big boss,” they said.

According to Chinatown sources, the man identified by the Senate subcommittee as the gang’s leader, Guo Liangqi, had been recruited by the tong’s officers in 1988 to lead turf wars against Chinatown’s more established tongs and to oversee extortion and debt collection. Indeed, this is where semi-independent smugglers and organized crime interlock: “Debt collection is rarely, if ever, done by the smuggler,” notes a confidential study of Chinese immigrant smuggling used by law enforcement agencies. “It is contracted to a gang.”

But Alex Lau, president of the tong, denies any connection between his group and either smuggling or gangs. “I can personally guarantee that none of the F.A.A.’s executive committee members are involved in illegal activity,” he says.

And what about delivering $50,000 to “the big boss?” “We have lots of bosses,” says Lau. “Besides,” he adds, leaning over his desk, “Do I look stupid to you? Would I do things that way?”

Within the Fuzhou community, many of the things law enforcement struggles to learn are discussed on the street: which snakeheads are in town, the number of U.S.-bound ships on the high seas. But there is a deeper level of secrecy, guarded not just by kinship and a tightly knit language group, but by fear. When it comes to organized crime, no one knows anything.

Strolling through Chinatown recently just after midnight, the hour when restaurants begin to turn out the lights, I looked for a public phone that wasn’t in use. I couldn’t find one. Hanging on every handset were Fuzhou men deep in conversations that never seemed to end. “They’re calling home--China, I mean--with stolen credit card numbers,” explained a longtime local resident. “Sometimes they talk for hours about how difficult life is for them. I’ve watched grown men sob.”

It is hard to imagine a more captive work force than smuggled Chinese immigrants. Arriving in the United States with huge debts of up to $30,000, they must accept whatever jobs are available, no matter how exploitative. Language barriers, lack of legal status, fear of the INS and intimidation by Chinese gangs all discourage the airing of grievances outside the Chinese community.

Nor is returning to China a viable option. When 524 passengers on a Hawaii-bound smuggling boat, the Eastwood, were repatriated by the United States in March, the Chinese government imposed heavy fines amounting to several years’ wages and sentenced those who couldn’t pay to forced labor. Moreover, the snakeheads refused to return large deposits or to cancel smuggling contracts. Indeed, at least 40 of the Eastwood passengers are already on the high seas again, according to Eastwood passengers in China and relatives in New York. They couldn’t afford not to come.

What is remarkable, however, given this extreme vulnerability, is that the level of abuse has not, so far, been higher. Indeed, the media image that has emerged--of indentured servants slaving for five or six years to pay principal and usurious interest under constant fear of retribution from the Chinese mob--is inaccurate in ways that exaggerate their plight. To begin with, smugglers are almost always paid C.O.D., as stipulated in standardized smuggling contracts. They conduct routine credit checks to make sure sponsoring relatives in the United States can pay once the cargo is delivered. “The smugglers have a lower default rate than most banks--about 5%,” according to Willard H. Meyers III, an immigration attorney in Philadelphia.

Together with his staff of five Chinese paralegals, Meyers has conducted detailed interviews with 3,000 Fuzhou immigrants over the past decade. His computerized database offers the best demographic profile available of America’s fastest-growing Chinese community.

On average, says Meyers, it takes two years to pay off a smuggling debt, not five. There are two reasons, he explains. “First, relatives don’t charge interest. Secondly, smugglees have a phenomenally high savings rate.” Frugality is so much the norm that Xiao Chen is perplexed when I ask how much he saves each month. “How much do you spend?” I ask instead. This time he gets it. “About $15.” Indeed, if the burdens are somewhat less onerous than has been portrayed, it is mainly because they don’t last forever. Assuming Xiao Chen’s next two years are as typical as the last two, he will have tucked away $25,000 in cash by mid-1995. At that point, he will be ready to invest in a small business. Or to sponsor his brother’s passage. “But I’d make sure he had a better snakehead than I did,” he says, laughing. “It took me more than a year to get here.”

“STEALING PASSAGE”: XIAO CHEN’S STORY

THE CHINESE VERNACULAR FOR HUMAN SMUGGLING-- TOUDU , OR “stealing passage”--is a misnomer. Freedom seekers and fortune hunters may steal across the U.S. border, whether under cover of night or a photo-subbed passport. But they certainly don’t steal their passage. They pay for it. Xiao Chen almost paid with his life. Many have.

His journey from Fuzhou to the South Bronx is one man’s extraordinary story, unique in detail and personality. But it is also an archetype of the recent Chinese-American immigrant experience: For every mainland Chinese who has migrated to the United States legally in the past 10 years, at least two have come as he did.

Recounting his story--most of it verified by a source close to U.S. enforcement agencies--Xiao Chen tells of the day he decided to come to America. It was 1988, and he had just turned 18. By then, the first generation of smugglees from his village were returning to visit after an absence of four or five years to flaunt their success in Meiguo (“beautiful country”). They showered gifts on clan members, offered donations for new schools, roads and parks. Everything about them said: “Come, it’s easy.”

Besides, Xiao Chen had already tasted the capricious lash of local power in China. “When I was 16, I broke a man’s nose after he hit my mother,” he recounts. “It turned out the guy’s uncle was the chief of police. Boy, did they beat me up in jail.” But it was a conversation with a former middle-school teacher, not the beating, that clinched his decision to leave. “When I told him I was looking for a job, he said, ‘I am 30 years old. I have a university degree. But I earn so little I can’t even cover the cost of getting married.’ It’s true. In China today, unless you are the child of an official, or know how to open back doors, it’s hopeless.”

Xiao Chen paid a $100 finder’s fee to get in touch with a snakehead, who in turn accepted a $250 down payment for a Chinese passport, which in that country’s corrupt system often must be purchased sub rosa from the police. In February, 1989, Xiao Chen got his passport and paid the $750 balance. The going rate today is $3,000.

The next step was to sign a contract. The terms were simple: Xiao Chen was to pay $2,500 up front and $25,000 within three days after arriving in New York, or, if caught at the airport, after being released by the INS. A dozen relatives contributed the $2,500 down payment, a decade’s earnings in rural China.

Just as Xiao Chen got his visa from Thailand, a major hub in the smuggling network, anti-government demonstrations engulfed Beijing. The massacre on June 4, 1989, and the subsequent crackdown blocked his exit. He had to wait.

Finally, in late December, he crossed with five others into Hong Kong, where he met the first in a large cast of smuggling subcontractors. From there, to Bangkok. “We were instructed to pass through immigration at a certain window and then look for a man holding a sign with a code word written in Chinese,” Xiao Chen says. “He took us to the Taipei Hotel. At least 150 others, just like us, were already there.”

The main bottleneck in air smuggling is the supply of stolen passports--Chinese passports are a red flag to U.S. immigration agents. But Xiao Chen had to wait an unusually long time--three months--because his snakehead had not paid the Thai agent for earlier services. Eventually, however, Xiao Chen was given a Japanese passport with his picture in it along with a round-trip ticket to New York via Karachi. But something went wrong at the Bangkok airport. The immigration official who had been bribed to overlook anything suspicious was not at his station. Xiao Chen was arrested for traveling with forged documents, stripped of his clothes and his cash ($700) and taken to prison, where they shaved his head and put him in manacles and leg irons.

“We were fed twice a day, a kind of soupy gruel that often had mildew, insects or worms in it,” Xiao Chen recalls of his three-month sentence. “Sometimes the guards would spit in our food before giving it to us. Every day we had pray to Buddha and listen to the Thai national anthem. At night we slept on the floor.”

After one month in a general holding area, Xiao Chen was moved into a small cell with four others, where water streamed continually through holes in one of the walls. “The only way to keep the water from submerging the three beds bolted to the floor was to use two small buckets to scoop it out,” he says. “Two people had to scoop vigorously around the clock just to keep up with the water.” And the place was full of insects, whose bites left him covered with tiny scars that looked like broken letters in alphabet soup.

From Thailand, Xiao Chen embarked on a nine-month tour of Asian capitals as his second-rate snakehead tried to engineer his passage to America. Using his Chinese passport, Xiao Chen went to Sri Lanka--a country he had never heard of but the only one that would give him a visa--where an exuberant man from Shanghai, as if to make amends or offer comic relief, put Xiao Chen and a dozen comrades up in a “high-class” hotel. They languished in comfort until Xiao Chen took matters into his own hands. In a kind of slave revolt, he led the group to the Thai Embassy, only to discover that he and several others were banned from returning to Thailand. Finally, in desperation, he got a visa to Hong Kong, where he started all over again.

This time, his snakehead packed him off to Nepal, where Xiao Chen received a new travel document: a stolen Singapore passport bearing his picture and a forged U.S. visa. The odyssey continued with stops in Bombay (where he met his friend Zhou Wei), Karachi, Kuala Lumpur, Karachi again, London and, in January, 1991, New York.

When the first in his group of six passed through the immigration gantlet at JFK without a hitch, Xiao Chen, reassured, glanced at Zhou Wei in an adjacent line. That’s when Xiao Chen realized his mistake. He had absent-mindedly fallen in behind another of his companions with a similarly altered passport. He thought of slipping into another line, but it was too late.

“The guy panicked,” Xiao Chen recalls. “When it came his turn, and the official started asking questions, he froze. He was terrified. Then, of course, he turned to me without thinking. Within half an hour, all of us--except the first one, who got through--were in chains. They took us to a room where men in uniform and a Chinese translator interrogated us. They asked to see our tickets, but we had destroyed the round-trip portion on the plane so they couldn’t send us back. “ ‘Admit you are Chinese,’ the translator said, ‘and we’ll let you go. If you don’t, we’ll deport you.’

“One of the immigration officers, inspecting the contents of my pockets, found a pinch of dirt wrapped in red paper, sacred soil from my ancestral village. ‘What’s this?’ he shouted. I explained to the translator. The officer emptied the packet onto the floor, glared at me, and then ground the dirt with his shoe.”

For the first time since leaving China, Xiao Chen felt utterly desperate. He had long since steeled himself to hardship, but humiliation was too much to bear.

Telling the story two years later, the muscles on his neck taut with anger, Xiao Chen stands in a crouch, simulating a position he was forced to assume that day: his arms manacled behind his back, and legs chained to a metal chair. Then he demonstrates how he rammed his head into a wall until he knocked himself out. The last thing he remembers is someone kicking him in the back as he lay on the floor.

THE U.S. RESPONSE

JACK SHAW IS FRUSTRATED. Just as the traffic in Chinese smuggling boats began to pick up last fall, Shaw, the INS assistant commissioner for investigations, had to dismantle anti-smuggling units because of budget cuts. Bill Slattery, the INS district director in New York, isn’t any happier. He’s only got enough space to detain a tiny fraction of the 15,000 illegal immigrants, most of them Chinese, who came through JFK last year--the rest are released into society “on parole” pending immigration hearings. Fraudulent asylum seekers, he says, are “taking control of U.S. borders away from the U.S. government.” And then there’s the mysterious fact--nobody in INS can explain it--that even after all appeals have been exhausted, deportable Chinese simply are not repatriated. “It burdens our system and sends the wrong signal to China,” complains one field agent.

None of these frustrations justifies the mistreatment--unusual in any case, according to immigration and human rights lawyers--Xiao Chen says he suffered at the hands of the INS. But they indicate the kinds of pressures and mixed messages that have thrown government policy on Chinese immigrant smuggling into disarray.

There are two overlapping fault lines. The first reflects tension between Shaw’s office in Washington and his front-line field agents, whose grievances came to light recently when an internal memo was leaked to the press. “While we have repeatedly proposed innovative local actions,” wrote Jim Hayes, the L.A.-based INS official, “we have been thwarted by headquarters’ lack of vision.” Hayes and like-minded colleagues complained that Washington lacked a comprehensive plan and withheld intelligence information from its own agents.

Responding to the conflict, the INS in late March convened a special meeting of senior agents and federal prosecutors to hammer out a coordinated approach, especially regarding the surge in smuggling by boat. By all accounts, the meeting produced real results, including a promise of greater cooperation from the prosecutors. “The problem--which was getting to be overwhelming--is being taken more seriously now,” comments Cathy Palmer, an assistant U.S. attorney in New York.

Getting federal prosecutors more involved was crucial, agree Shaw and Hayes. To date, there has been little incentive for the government to take alien smugglers to court. Costly and cumbersome investigations are hard to justify when convictions--and there have only been a few--typically result in a few months’ jail time. But as the connection between smuggling and Asian organized crime becomes clear, so too has the importance of penetrating the criminal networks and passing legislation that would stiffen penalties for transporting undocumented aliens.

Whether the new thinking will be put into effect is another matter, but for the time being, at least, the INS seems to have seized upon another tactic: stopping ships on the high seas. The seizure of the Eastwood in February near the Marshall Islands was an accident--the U.S. Coast Guard was responding to a distress signal. But repatriating the 524 Chinese on board required a carefully executed strategy, which was replayed in early May when U.S. authorities steered a Florida-bound ship, laden with would-be Chinese immigrants, to Honduras, where the vessel was registered. U.S. officials hope those smugglees are sent back to China.

The aim is clear: to keep smuggled Chinese immigrants from arriving at the U.S. border or setting foot on U.S. soil. Once they do, they are entitled to an asylum hearing before an immigration judge, and become entangled in a legal process that takes years to unfold. In the meantime, they are given work authorization. “They get exactly what they are after, even when they get caught,” says one INS agent in exasperation.

But there are problems with the “Eastwood” approach. First, it misses several ships for every one it stops. And by turning them away, the government loses access to witnesses who might help them expose and prosecute criminal operators.

The biggest problem, however, lies elsewhere. “What if there were genuine refugees on board?” asks Arthur Helton, director of the Refugee Project at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York.

Indeed, at the heart of the second split in the INS is the question of how to evaluate asylum claims--especially those based on China’s sometimes Draconian family-planning policy, which limits families to one child and forces abortions or other penalties on those who don’t comply. This split pits the State Department and law enforcement, which generally have little patience with these claims, against INS general counsel Grover Joseph Rees III, who is determined to give each claim a fair hearing. Relations are strained, to put it mildly.

When President Bush signed the 1990 executive order offering safe haven to Chinese students in the United States after the massacre near Tian An Men Square, he also required the attorney general and the State Department to give “enhanced consideration” to “individuals from any country who express fear of persecution . . . related to their country’s policy of forced abortion or coerced sterilization.” This provision has no time limit.

Rees, a Bush holdover whose critics within the government characterize him as an “anti-abortion zealot,” has used his authority to broaden this provision, and to make it easier for asylum applicants to argue that China’s population-control policies constitute political persecution, a requirement for refugee status. The impact of his instructions has been unmistakable. “Suddenly I am winning all my cases. Some are being thrown out even before coming in front of a judge,” observes one immigration attorney. “One judge in New York scribbled ‘INS policy’ on the bottom of his decision” to grant asylum, while others, he says, have referred directly to the Rees memos.

That sort of anecdote makes Shaw clench his teeth. “The executive order is a major impediment,” he says curtly, restraining himself. “It creates the appearance of a magnet.” The State Department, which reviews all asylum applications, is also highly skeptical of Chinese asylum claims. “Based on (our) experience, it appears all the asylum cases originating from Changle County (near Fuzhou city) are based on fraudulent claims of persecution,” reads a typical case evaluation by an agent based in the American Consulate in Guangzhou.

Manipulation of the asylum procedure is, to be sure, commonplace. One “service provider” in Chinatown who helps newly arrived smugglees apply for permission to work explains: “Two years ago, it was still plausible to submit documents proving you were in the U.S. before the cutoff date for protection under the executive order. We call that the ‘June 4th card.’ Last year, when the INS tightened up the documentary requirements, we switched to asylum,” whether or not there was merit to the claim.

The U.S. asylum process does not always err on the side of generosity. He Xueping is ulcer-plagued proof. Last fall, he was caught entering the country with forged documents, and he has been in jail ever since. In February, his application for political asylum was denied.

That was a mistake: He Xueping is the genuine article. Facing arrest in China for harboring a student fugitive from Beijing, he was advised by a friend in the local police station to flee. A beverage wholesaler, he already had a passport and a valid visa for Hong Kong, so he left the next day. Once there, he contacted a snakehead who sent him on a journey only slightly less horrific than Xiao Chen’s. The judge at his hearing did not doubt his story. Amazingly, he doubted only that he would face persecution if he returned to China. The case is on appeal.

I met He Xueping, who holds a BA and a teaching credential from Fuzhou University, in the visiting room of the INS detention facility in lower Manhattan. That is where he told me about his wife’s forced abortion.

“It would have been our second child. We were given an ultimatum: the abortion, or sterilization for me. We agonized over the decision, but finally thought that we might be able to have a child later under different circumstances.” He says that local officials began stricter enforcement of the “one child per family” rule in May of 1991. “They do it on a quota system--so many abortions per village or township. The officials are fined if they don’t meet the quotas. I have seen police set up roadblocks to inspect for pregnant women.”

His account is especially credible because it is not part of his asylum claim. He never even told his lawyer, and told me only when I asked. It is also buttressed by recent news accounts and reports from human-rights organizations, which document coerced late-term abortions and egregious punishments, including huge fines and even destruction of homes.

“Part of our job is to sort out valid claims from fraudulent ones,” says Rees. “We do need solutions, but they shouldn’t include sending people back who will be persecuted.” Besides, Rees points out, the numbers involved are quite small. Of the 1,563 Chinese asylum claims decided by immigration judges last year, only 481 were granted. And of these, approximately half were based on coercive family-planning grounds.

Rees, who some expect to keep his powerful post once a new INS chief is confirmed, insists that his opposition to China’s policies is not simply a reflection of his anti-abortion views. Indeed, he helped draft legislation introduced in the Senate in March designed to give INS officials enhanced authority to summarily turn back individuals trying to enter the United States with forged documents, or no documents at all. The problem, he says, is not the goal of curbing illegal immigration, but the often unfair way it is enforced.

The handling of the Eastwood is a case in point. It was, in the words of an official from one of the international agencies involved, “a real railroad job.” The Eastwood saga underscores the tension between the effort to seal U.S. borders to illegal immigrants, on the one hand, and the willingness to open them to legitimate refugees, on the other.

Many agencies took part in the processing of the passengers: the State Department, the INS, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, the International Office of Migration and the U.S. Navy. The INS conducted interviews with two aims in mind: gathering intelligence on smuggling and determining if any of the passengers might qualify as refugees. The first objective was pursued with considerably more vigor than the second. Only 30 interviews to determine refugee status were conducted--the rest were specifically geared toward investigation. Moreover, the questions were asked not by refugee specialists but by anti-smuggling agents whose training and positions almost inevitably prejudiced their appraisals.

The commission for refugees, which was supposed to determine the passengers’ refugee status, conducted no independent interviews. It simply deferred to the INS. “The local Chinese specialists have characterized (the passengers) as street-smart persons who lack the traditional social and or institutional underpinning of Chinese morality,” read the internal report filed by the commission’s representative to headquarters in Geneva. “Their statements contained many references to the desire for better jobs, need for stable employment, dissatisfaction with prevailing conditions and home,” the report continued, as if such aspirations were somehow evidence of amorality.

Most serious of all, perhaps, was the investigators’ apparent willingness to ignore letters and statements written by the passengers while in detention.

One letter, for example, opened with a salutation from “the entire female group,” comprising more than 50 women. “We are farm girls and don’t know how to articulate ourselves,” it began. After describing the deplorable conditions on the ship, the letter went on to express certain fears. “If we go back (to China) we will be sentenced to between two and five years in jail. After we serve our sentence, we will be fined. We can no longer live in China. We got on the ship because we can’t stand it anymore.

“For example,” the letter continued, “the birth control policy. According to Chinese law, every rural resident after a second child must voluntarily have a hysterectomy. And now we are being fined according to our children’s ages, again and again. We cannot survive these rules.”

It is not self-evident the statements in this letter are accurate or that the fears are well grounded. Still, “each of the women should have been interviewed by the (U.N. refugee commission),” comments Helton, of the Refugee Project for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. This seems all the more obvious in hindsight, given the letter’s accurate prediction of the passengers’ fate.

BUSINESS IS STILL BOOMING

MEDIA ATTENTION GENERATED by the recent ship seizures has not dampened the smuggling business. Hawkers on the streets of Fuzhou still call out “Change Money! Go to America!” in the same breath, and dozens of boats are being refitted in Taiwan and Hong Kong to accommodate human cargo, according to INS intelligence.

There are even signs that other regions of China are getting into the act.

I bumped into Old Xia, quite literally, as he made his way through a New York subway car selling tops and toy cars out of a big plastic bag. His story was typical in every respect except one: He is not from Fujian, but neighboring Zhejiang province. So are several dozen of his friends, as well as the snakehead and his enforcers.

But even if the Fuzhou phenomenon does not spread, it has already acquired an inertia of its own. “The smuggling from the Fuzhou region is no longer event-driven,” concludes Meyers, looking at changing patterns in his clientele. “The second generation is coming now--wives, children, siblings, even parents. The new impetus is family reunification.”

There is another change under way: The sensational stories about brutal gang beating and indentured servitude are far less exceptional than before. For the first time, smugglers are bringing people who are borrowing money from loan sharks in China, and who have no way of paying off their debts upon arrival. The enforcers are getting busy.

They are also moving into Southern California. “We have strong evidence that the New York-based gangs facilitating alien smuggling are setting up permanent contacts and bases in the L.A. area,” says an INS agent. “An expansion is under way.”

Meanwhile, the shift continues from air smuggling to boats, which now account, according to law-enforcement estimates, for more than half of all illegal entries. The reasons are apparent. From the smugglers’ perspective, it is logistically easier and results in a bigger profit margin. From the smugglees’ perspective, it obviates the need for a passport and reduces the cost of passage. From the perspective of law enforcement, however, the traffic in human cargo from China--whether by air or boat--remains an ongoing nightmare.