Canada Faces Tide of Boat People

A fisheries patrol plane spotted it first--a rusty old cargo ship, unmarked and unflagged, lurking off the coast of Vancouver Island.

That alone stood out amid the usual traffic of fishing boats and barges. But coast guard officials got a bigger surprise when they boarded the vessel. Jammed inside its stinking, garbage-strewn hold were 123 Chinese migrants, wobbly-kneed after a 39-day voyage across the Pacific.

Immigration officials hoped the July 20 incident was an isolated event. But three weeks later, a second boatload of Chinese splashed ashore. On Aug. 31, the Canadian navy seized a third boat off the coast; nine days later, a fourth.

In all, 599 boat people have been caught since July--no one knows how many boatloads got through undetected--and more may be on the way. British Columbia has become an improbable back door to New York City, the first landfall along a route of human smuggling that begins in the poverty of China’s Fujian Province and ends in the sweatshops of New York’s Chinatown.

The migrants, nearly all of them seeking refugee status in Canada by claiming they were persecuted in China, are straining government budgets and reigniting debate over Canada’s immigration laws.

It’s not as if a creaky old boat is the only way into Canada. About 25,000 refugee claims are submitted each year by new arrivals from all countries, and about half are approved, said Lorna Tessier, a spokeswoman for the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.

But never have so many would-be refugees arrived all at once, and in such dramatic fashion. During their 6,000-mile voyage across the Pacific, many migrants got only a bowl of rice and two glasses of questionable water each day.

“It speaks to the level of desperation these people feel,” Tessier said. “That’s a long crossing with no washrooms, no beds and contaminated water.”

The journey begins in Fujian on China’s southeast coast, where smugglers known as snakeheads approach impoverished farmers and other villagers with an alluring sales pitch.

“They’re told a story about the good life here,” said Victor Wong, head of the Vancouver Assn. of Chinese Canadians. Passage costs up to $38,000, but most migrants pay little or no money up front, pledging to repay their debt once they’re working.

“They’re told that if they work three years, they’ll be home free,” Wong said. “They’re told they’ll make the trip in an ocean liner.”

The reality is more like what happened to Yu Ying Chen, a skinny 18-year-old who arrived Aug. 11. After nearly two months at sea, Chen’s boat slipped past Canadian patrols in the fog and nosed in close to the shore of Kungit Island, 500 miles north of Vancouver.

The rocky, spruce-studded island is as remote a spot as any along British Columbia’s 16,000 miles of coastline. The smugglers told Chen and the other 129 passengers to look for a road, even though they had no way of knowing whether there were any towns or roads in the area.

There weren’t. Chen and the others, including children as young as 8, waded through the surf and huddled on a windy beach as the boat that dropped them off vanished back into the fog.

Canadian authorities caught up with the vessel 80 miles out to sea and arrested its nine crew members. Coast Guard boats, meanwhile, ferried Chen and the other migrants 10 hours south to the Vancouver Island town of Port Hardy, where they boarded buses for an 8-hour drive to a Canadian navy base near Victoria.

In early October, after six weeks in jail, Chen found himself in a stuffy hearing room in downtown Vancouver. Shackled and dressed in jail-issue red pants and shirt, the teenager sat nervously, slumping against the wall, occasionally lifting both cuffed hands to push his hair from his forehead.

This was a hearing before an Immigration and Refugee Board adjudicator, held to determine whether Chen should be released while his refugee claim is reviewed.

Through an interpreter, Chen said he wanted asylum in Canada. He said he had a relative in Toronto, but when pressed for specifics, he couldn’t provide any. The adjudicator ordered him held for another month, suggesting that he might be released later if the Toronto relative materialized and could put up a $15,000 deposit.

Chen nodded grimly and shuffled out of the room on the arm of a guard, heading back to jail for another month.

The sudden influx of Chinese has put government officials in a bind. It’s expensive--more than $5 million so far--to detain migrants while their refugee claims are reviewed, a process that can take up to a year. But few who are released ever show up for their hearings.

Eighty-six of those arriving on the first boat were released, and at least 51 of them have vanished, presumed to have skipped town, said Lois Reimer, a spokeswoman for the immigration department.

“They are part of one of the grandest smuggling schemes ever seen by the Canada Immigration Department,” says a document that the agency filed to argue for keeping the rest of the boat people locked up. “The snakeheads and their emissaries are always waiting in the shadows to retrieve their clients upon their release from immigration custody.”

According to investigators, the smuggling pipeline stretches from Vancouver to Toronto, where migrants are kept in safe houses and then taken across the U.S. border through Indian reservations. Their destination usually is New York City, where they’ve been promised under-the-table jobs in Chinatown.

Canada is a country built by immigrants, with an increasingly Oriental flavor. About 7% of Canada’s 29 million residents are of Asian origin, according to census figures. Vancouver, which is 25% Asian, is jokingly called Hongcouver in Hong Kong.

But the sudden wave of boat people has prompted calls for stricter enforcement against illegal immigration and tougher criteria in granting refugee status. Many Canadians, especially other immigrants, resent that boat people are “jumping the queue” ahead of aliens who may wait years for permission to move here.

“You feel sorry for them as human beings, but there are ways to come into the country legally,” said Betty Hamilton, 55, who runs a bed-and-breakfast in Port Hardy.

She joined several hundred onlookers in August when Coast Guard boats arrived in the harbor with Chen and the other 129 Chinese from the second boat. As the newcomers were ushered ashore, one resident welcomed them by playing “O Canada” on a trumpet, over and over. But four Indian women from a nearby reservation protested, wearing placards that said “Feed our People First.”

Hamilton believes the boat people are naive. “They come in blinded by a big dream that isn’t here,” she said. “They are victims, as far as I’m concerned. . . . I don’t think they have a clue about what awaits them.”

Wong, of the Chinese Canadian association, said treating the newcomers like criminals is a cruel thing to do to people seeking sanctuary from persecution. While others contend that the boat people merely are trying to escape poverty, Wong said most of them have genuine concerns about human rights abuses in China.

“They’re leaving to escape China’s one-child policy,” he said, referring to the limits the communist government places on family size. “Or they’re trying to escape religious persecution. Some are Christians, and Christians are known to be persecuted in Fujian Province. Or they’re persecuted as an ethnic minority.”

The Chinese government has urged Canada to return all the boat people to China, to discourage illegal immigration.

“There is no political persecution in China,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said Sept. 7 at a Beijing news briefing. “Most of these migrants are farmers. They are not political refugees.”

Whatever their motives, they are likely to keep coming. The grapevine in Vancouver’s Chinatown has it that about a dozen boats had left Fujian Province by early September, though the publicity surrounding the first four may have diverted later vessels to other countries.

The navy, coast guard and Royal Canadian Mounted Police are on alert. Officials say winter weather may temporarily stop the boat traffic, but they’re not counting on it.

Authorities say none of the four recently arrived boats met minimal safety standards for a long voyage.

The Pacific is wide, and its storms are fierce. Reimer, of the immigration department, believes a rickety boat stuffed full of migrants could easily disappear. If it did, she said, “people may never know.”