Thailand Wages Uphill Battle Against People-Smuggling

Sitting forlornly on the paving stones of the jail courtyard, the young Chinese insists his arrest for illegal immigration was all a mistake.

The plea is echoed by 40 other Chinese men sitting around him, haggard from a night in jail after being rounded up at a seedy hotel in a Chinese section of Bangkok.

Police tell a different story: That the men, all of them from Chaozhou in southern China’s Guangdong province, entered Thailand illegally.

“I have relatives here! I have a visa!” shouts the Chinese man, who like the others refuses to give his name and shields his face from photographers.

But he cowers when Amnuay Unjit, a detective with the Immigration Police, stands over him and laughs.

“He has no visa. He has no relatives here,” Amnuay says. “He is waiting to be smuggled to America.”

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Law enforcement officials say Bangkok is the busiest transit point for people-smuggling in the world. Despite more money, manpower and international cooperation, they say about 2,000 people a month--more than ever before--are smuggled through Bangkok to third countries. Most go to the United States, lured by a chance at jobs and a better life.

What those people frequently find is misery. Ask the 62 Thais freed from a California garment sweatshop in August, or the 30 women rescued from a brothel in New York’s Chinatown the previous year.

They were human cargo in a low-risk, high-return business run by criminal gangs in Hong Kong and Bangkok that feeds payoffs to border policemen, immigration officials, airline employees and senior government officials all along the route. It’s driven by demand for low-cost labor and families who want to be reunited with relatives.

“It’s so lucrative we’ve actually seen instances of drug smugglers switching to people-smuggling,” says Mark Riordan, an official of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service based in Bangkok.

In a recent study on money laundering, Pasuk Phongpaichit of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok estimated that people-smuggling earns $3.2 billion a year in Thailand alone. But that figure is based only on an estimate of the number of Thai women smuggled to Japan, Germany and Taiwan for prostitution.

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Bangkok is a multiethnic city, home to Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Burmese and Middle Easterners. Different criminal gangs are involved in smuggling for each group. The largest by far are the mainland Chinese.

Some of the smugglers’ customers get to Bangkok with a tourist visa and plane ticket from Hong Kong. The less fortunate make their way on foot through China’s Yunnan province and across the hills and jungles of Myanmar to Thailand.

Kyi Thein, a tour guide in Yangon, Myanmar’s capital, says: “There are many in Chinatown who are waiting to get into Thailand and on to America.” She says it costs about $35,000 each.

One reason they choose Thailand is freedom of movement, says Pasuk at Chulalongkorn University.

Another is that Bangkok is a center of document forging. Gangs in the city’s Chinatown and the business district specialize in stealing and forging passports, identity cards and visas.

Obtaining a quality forged passport and visa is costly and can take months, so illegal immigrants hide out in the city or in neighboring Cambodia, a cheaper place in which police can be bribed to look the other way. When the documents are ready, most people are smuggled out through Bangkok’s Don Muang airport.

“They go to the airport with a ‘jockey,’ ” detective Amnuay says. “Jockeys” are often Singaporean because their English is good and they can talk the illegal immigrant through any trouble.

Once past airport immigration, the illegal immigrant is on his own. Upon reaching America, there are various ways to get past immigration, but a popular one is to seek political asylum, Riordan says.

Not all arrive by air. Two years ago, the freighter Golden Venture sailed from Thailand with a cargo of hundreds of Chinese. After it ran aground off New York City, the deluge of media attention choked off the flow of smuggling ships for a while.

But Riordan says more ships are leaving Thailand again.

“It does feel like a losing battle sometimes,” he says.

Penalties in the United States have been increased to 10 years in prison from 2 to 4 years and a fine of $25,000 for each illegal immigrant smuggled. Washington also is considering stationing more U.S. immigration officers overseas.

In November, Thai police arrested a man they say was the mastermind of the Golden Venture affair, Lee Peng Fei, also known as Char Lee. He is in a Bangkok jail awaiting trial and possible extradition to the United States.

“They are trying,” Riordan says of the Thai police. “They know this is a black eye on the reputation of their country.”