Smuggling People to U.S. Is Big Business in Thailand

Fifty miles from the Mekong River, a man wearing a gray safari suit showed up in March, peddling the American dream.

His name was Ekapop Kotalee, and he said he was a doctor. He told people he could find them jobs in the United States, even if their only prior work experience was planting and harvesting rice paddies.

A villager in the hard-luck farming country of northeastern Thailand may make only 20,000 bahts, or about $840, from his annual rice crop. In the United States, Kotalee said, anybody employed in a factory could earn twice that in a month.

In all, nine people ponied up at least 10,000 bahts, or about $420, so Kotalee could get them U.S. visas, plane tickets and jobs.

“We sort of believed it was legal,” said Busaba Polthep, who persuaded her 18-year-old son, her stepson, 32, and his wife to leave for America. The plump matron paused as she chewed thoughtfully on a betel nut. “Well, semi-legal.”

Kotalee’s scheme came to naught for reasons that Thai police are investigating. The squat man in his 30s, who is no doctor, is now jailed in Bangkok, the capital, and claims he was organizing a group tour of France. He may be a simple con artist, bent on bilking gullible country folk.

On the other hand, Polthep’s relatives may be lucky they are still in Thailand, worrying how to reimburse the loan sharks who advanced them the funds to pay Kotalee. One month ago, state and local authorities raided an underground garment works in El Monte, where 72 other Thais who had been fraudulently brought into the United States were allegedly compelled to live and work in indentured servitude, some reportedly for seven years.

It was a shocking case for Americans but not really for Thais, except that the alleged enslavement occurred in the United States. In Japan alone, say women’s activists in Thailand, up to 50,000 Thai females who illegally entered the country may be employed as prostitutes.

They are often the virtual slaves of the mamasans , or madams, who purchase them for as much as $200,000 from Thai recruiters or members of the yakuza , Japan’s underworld.

Thailand boasts one of Southeast Asia’s most dynamic economies. But not all Thais have benefited from the boom. Each year, 70,000 to 80,000 people go through the proper legal channels and apply to work overseas through the Labor and Social Welfare Ministry.

Others, like the seamstresses and sewing machine mechanics freed in the Aug. 2 police raid in El Monte, take a different route: through unlicensed and shadowy labor recruiters, or criminal gangs. These Thais may also end up in the garment factories of Switzerland or New Zealand, or in the karaoke bars of Japan.

“The labor agent will do everything: get passports, visas, arrange a tour to the United States, fake the photos,” said Pairat Pongcharoen, a spokesman for the Royal Thai Police. “They can’t say they’re going to work, so they’ll claim it’s a tour to Disneyland or some other place.”

Such emigration, especially of women, is notorious and risky enough that a song by a Thai pop group, Hope, pleads with the country’s females to think hard before leaving in search of dollars or yen. Titled “Export Girls,” it warns young Thai women: “Don’t go abroad./You’ll be cheated into selling your springtime.”

That, U.S. authorities say, was the harrowing experience of a group of illegal Thai immigrants who ended up in suburban homes in the San Gabriel Valley and were forced to work as prostitutes to pay off a $35,000 travel debt.

In January, two Rosemead residents--one a Vietnamese national, the other his Thai girlfriend--pleaded guilty to pimping, pandering and false imprisonment of the women, who slipped into the United States with bogus passports.

Each month, U.S. officials in Bangkok estimate, at least 2,000 people in Thailand attempt to leave for America. They lie or use fraudulent papers to obtain Thai passports and U.S. visas or buy phony travel documents.

Others try to make the trip clandestinely without papers: Hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants set off from the seaside city of Pattaya, south of Bangkok, aboard the ill-fated freighter Golden Venture and ran aground off a New York City beach in June, 1993.

Only 20% of these 2,000 would-be immigrants every month are Thais; the bulk are Chinese, Indians, Bangladeshis and citizens of other countries.

“To say we become even aware of 30% of them [the 2,000] is reaching, and I’m trying to make us look good here,” said one American official, acknowledging that most of the fraudulent or smuggled immigrants reach their destination.

This motley outflow has made Bangkok one of the major transit points for foreigners intending to enter the United States illegally. “There’s a lot of money involved here in people-smuggling; we’re talking tens of millions of dollars,” the official said.

In fact, profits are so great--a 50% return on a person paying $35,000 to get from China to the United States via Thailand is common--that some drug smugglers have switched to running human cargo.

Thai authorities have done little to determine how the workers held captive in El Monte were recruited and brought into the United States. “We are reading and clipping the newspapers,” said a secretary in the Foreign Affairs Division of the Royal Thai Police.

In the Immigration Bureau, officers said they are waiting for the freed workers to return from the United States so they can interview them and come up with leads. “We in the police don’t feel it’s a big deal,” said Pongcharoen, the police spokesman. Sending people to the United States is not a crime in Thailand, he said.

Labor recruitment is a government-licensed activity, and workers are supposed to apply to the Labor Ministry before going overseas. But Charturon Attawiparkpaisan, deputy director general of the ministry’s Department of Employment, said violations occur “all the time.”

The workers who were kept captive in El Monte flew to the United States on genuine passports whose photos had been switched, but that is so common a practice in Thailand that officials at the U.S. Consulate in Bangkok have nicknamed the city “the fraudulent-document capital of the world.”

Outright forgeries and proper--but misleading--documents obtained with lies or bribes are rife. This year, 20 American and Thai consular employees will process an estimated 85,000 applications for non-immigrant visas, up 22% from 1994. They have learned to trust nothing on paper.

“The consular officer has to ask himself, ‘Do I believe this person?’ ” said a U.S. Embassy official.

The alleged ringleader of the El Monte operation, Suni Manasurangkul, 65, and her son Sukt (Sang) Manasurangkul, 40, also known as Sanchai Pongprapin, have no criminal records in their native Thailand. Sukt Manasurangkul is accused of having recruited workers in Bangkok’s dynamic garment district with false promises of what awaited them in America. Thai police said that, like many other irregular labor export schemes, this one appears to have been relatively modest.

“Just two or three people might serve here as recruiters,” said Col. Surasak Suttharom, deputy commander of the Crime Suppression Division. “Or an individual agent. It’s not like the yakuza in Japan.”

As Kotalee, the phony doctor, learned in the Nong Bua Lam Phu region 260 miles northeast of the capital, finding Thais ready to gamble on a foreign trip in return for an opportunity to make more money is easy. In the grim, narrow streets of Bangkok that few tourists visit, employees toil in 10,000 small-scale garment factories for 16 hours a day or more and dream of a better life.

“Of course I know of the recruiters,” said one 22-year-old seamstress, Sujari, who was stitching shirts beneath the glare of a naked fluorescent tube in her grimy single-room sewing works in the Huay Kwang district. “But no one has come to recruit me.”

In May, following a request from U.S. authorities, Thai police broke up a Bangkok-based recruiting ring that had been shipping prostitutes equipped with photo-substituted passports to brothels in the New York City area. “It was the first time the U.S. government has asked for our cooperation [in a fraudulent documents immigration case],” Suttharom said.

For months, word had been spreading along Patpong Road, the center of Bangkok night life with its pulsating go-go bars and massage parlors, that work for women was available in the United States.

Though the recruits later told U.S. investigators that they were promised good jobs in restaurants, Thai police believe the career “service girls” knew exactly what was expected of them.

A Bangkok company, Bavarian Thai Manpower International, allegedly oversaw the applications for U.S. visas that were made under false names. One alleged recruiter was a Thai-born American, Thomas Patrick Gamble, 24, who is accused of having escorted at least one of the women on a flight to New York.

Once in the United States, the Thais were imprisoned in brothels and forced to engage in prostitution. To repay the cost of their transportation, the women were told they would have to serve from 280 to 500 customers, they told investigators later.

“I’m sure it’s still going on,” a U.S. official in Bangkok said of the traffic in Thai prostitutes.

After a federal magistrate issued a warrant in March, Gamble was arrested and shipped back to the United States. But Ludwig Janak, the 42-year-old German operator of Bavarian Thai Manpower, and two of the four Thais whose extradition was also requested by the Americans have yet to be found.

Last year, the Crime Suppression Division of the Thai police broke up three similar rings that were getting ready to ship women to South Africa and Japan. According to Suttharom, under Thai law his officers can strike only if the organizers are resorting to bogus passports or other documents.

Prachya Davi Tavedikul, an official in Thailand’s Foreign Ministry, believes the El Monte case may have a silver lining: “We can use it as a tool, a PR thing, to warn people who may be lured to work in the United States.”

Meanwhile, Thailand’s passport agency is phasing in a new type of passport, which uses laser printing and a protective overlay, that should make photo substitution much harder.

Still, said Tavedikul, “This problem will linger for a while, until we can offer better opportunities in our home country.”

* DOWNTOWN RALLY: Thai workers freed in El Monte offer thanks at rally. B1