In Europe, Wave of Illegal Migration Has Deadly Cost

The 58 Chinese immigrants found suffocated in the back of a refrigerated truck in Dover last month have exposed a horrifyingly simple truth: Men, women and children are dying to get into Europe.

Although the Dover tragedy was extreme, it was hardly isolated. More than 2,000 people are known to have died crossing the seas and borders of Western Europe in the last seven years, and the mortal tide continues with numbing regularity.

They drown in the Adriatic on the way to Italy or in the Strait of Gibraltar while headed for Spain. They step on mines along the Iranian-Turkish border and freeze to death on an icy mountain pass between Bulgaria and Greece. They die in the landing gear of a commercial airplane.

This grim toll is the underbelly of Europe’s economic success and, to some degree, of its efforts to clamp down on illegal immigration. Pulled by a demand for unskilled laborers and pushed by desperation in their own countries, more and more Asians, Africans, Indians and Eastern Europeans are making their way to Western Europe’s dynamic cities.

Visa requirements, sanctions against airlines transporting illegal immigrants and new enforcement measures, however, have forced these desperate migrants to seek ever more clandestine and dangerous routes into Western Europe. Whether they are refugees fleeing persecution or laborers looking for a job, for the majority of migrants the only way into Europe is illegally and often perilously.

Professional traffickers are happy to ply their trade to the 250,000 refugees who ask for asylum in European Union countries each year and to the hundreds of thousands of economic migrants looking for a better life. Law enforcement officials and refugee workers say the business of human trafficking has become as lucrative as drug smuggling in Europe.

“There has always been illegal immigration, but there is a massive growth in organized, illegal immigration. Instead of coming in ones and twos, they are coming in fifties and hundreds,” said Fleur Strong, a spokeswoman for Britain’s National Criminal Intelligence Service.

“In most European countries, the penalties for human trafficking are lower than for drugs, and the money is just as good,” Strong said.

While the short trip from Albania to Italy may cost as little as $500 to $1,000, the price of an illegal journey from China’s Fujian province to London ranges from $18,000 to $30,000.

The penalty for people smuggling in Britain is $3,000 a head for drivers and up to 10 years in prison for trafficking masterminds. Drug smuggling is punishable by prison terms of up to life.

“Human smuggling is a growth industry for organized crime, and [the smugglers] adapt well to changing circumstances,” said Mark Pugash, a spokesman for the Kent County police in Dover.

Smugglers Can Quickly Reroute Their ‘Cargo’

When routes from China to London through Russia come under scrutiny, traffickers quickly transfer their “cargo” through Thailand or Cambodia. Law enforcement pressure on one European border may shift immigrants and would-be refugees to another.

“The majority of immigrants have a likely destination, but when they arrive [at the border] they look at the circumstances in Europe,” said Bobby Chan, a legal advisor with the Central London Law Center. “There are always rumors about the amnesty situation. Recently, clients told me there were rumors that there would be an amnesty in Britain for the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday.”

Immigration attorney Wah-Piow Tan believes that the 58 Chinese who died en route from the Netherlands to Dover might have been the victims of one smuggler’s efforts to outwit British law enforcement techniques. Typically, immigrants have been ferried across the channel inside canvas-topped trucks that let in air but also make it easy for police dogs to sniff out human scent.

“The syndicates have responded with more expensive transportation. At one point the air vent was closed on this truck,” Tan said. “Was it because something went wrong, or was it because of a fear of being detected by the dogs?”

An estimated 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants live in the European Union, compared with about 7 million in the United States, which has a slightly smaller population than Western Europe.

But about 500,000 illegal immigrants try to get into the EU each year, according to British Home Office figures.

British officials detected 616 people trying to enter the country illegally in 1996 and 16,000 last year. They now nab about 100 illegal immigrants daily in Dover--stopping a small fraction of the 4,000 trucks that roll off the ferries each day. About half of the immigrants say they had planned to ask for asylum, and half say they had planned to remain illegally.

Across the channel in Pas de Calais, French officials detained 8,500 illegal immigrants last year, an increase of more than 500% over the previous year. Improved detection might account for some of the increase, but experts say the numbers reflect rising migration across the region.

As for how many people die trying to get in, figures are anecdotal. The International Organization for Migration in Geneva states on its Web site that “numbers collated from just two news sources show that at least 467 smuggled/trafficked migrants died in 1999 and the first half of 2000.”

The Dutch organization United for Intercultural Action has compiled a list of more than 2,060 people who have died trying to reach Europe since 1993. But they say this is far from complete because it represents only those cases that have come to the attention of authorities. Other victims might have been lost at sea or died in airtight trucks that officials didn’t manage to detect. Still others might have died under the yoke of traffickers who forced them into prostitution and other coerced labor to pay off their debts.

Clearly, the toll continues:

* Last week, a 10-month-old Kosovo Albanian died of dehydration on the southern Italian coast town of Porto Badisco, where she reportedly was ditched by a smuggler fleeing police. This week, Italian authorities averted a disaster when they rescued 228 Iranian Kurds and Moroccans--including 53 children--from a boat wreck off the southern coast near Reggio Calabria.

* More than 30 immigrants died trying to enter Greece illegally from November 1999 through January 2000, including two Eastern European women who froze to death on an icy mountain pass from Bulgaria after being stranded when smugglers failed to meet them in a snowstorm.

* Spain’s Guardia Civil pulled 29 bodies from Spanish waters in 1999, and immigrant associations estimate that, with the increased traffic, three times that many have drowned already this year trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in rickety boats. Among them were five North African men and a 16-year-old girl who drowned when their vessel sank near the southern coastal town of Tarifa on May 19.

Illegal immigrants normally travel without documents, and many victims are never identified. Many have no family in Europe to make the identification, and, in other cases, relatives are too afraid to come forward.

This has complicated the job of naming the 58 immigrants from Fujian province who were discovered in Dover last month behind a load of tomatoes in an airtight truck.

Many Chinese immigrants who believe that they had family on the truck were afraid to present themselves to authorities in Britain either because they are here illegally or because they fear it would prejudice their own pending asylum cases, according to immigration lawyers. As a result, Kent police went to China to collect DNA samples to match against the victims’.

While Kosovo Albanians, Afghans and Iraqis are likely to claim asylum when they arrive in Britain, Chinese and Indian immigrants are more likely to go underground. Regardless of their intentions once they get here, most immigrants arrive by the same dangerous means as the Chinese who died.

Gon Nokr, a 23-year-old Kosovo Albanian, paid about $6,000 to be taken from his hometown of Kosovska Mitrovica to London eight months ago. For that price, he walked to the neighboring country of Macedonia, where he was loaded into the back of a truck next to 25 other people for a four-day drive with one stop for food and water.

“I was very, very scared. There was no fresh air, no eating or drinking,” Nokr said.

Rodion Gulakov, 25, of St. Petersburg, Russia, was one of the luckier ones. He bought a plane ticket from Russia to Cyprus with a stopover in London, where he jumped ship between Gatwick and Heathrow airports. But then he had to pay a compatriot $700 for information on how to ask for refuge.

Many Take Extra Risk to Reach Britain

Nokr and Gulakov are two of the 680 refugees awaiting answers to their asylum claims at the government-funded London Park Hotel, an example of why immigrants seek out Western Europe. In Britain, asylum-seekers receive free housing, food vouchers, legal aid and necessary medical care and, after six months, are allowed to go to work.

Although they may already have reached Europe, many economic immigrants want to take the extra gamble on crossing the channel to Britain because they think they have a better chance of finding work and living undetected here. Chinese immigrants say they can disappear into Europe’s largest Chinese community--about 150,000 in London--and work for bosses who speak their language.

Others say Britain is a more open, less policed society than Germany, where residency papers are required for something as simple as opening a bank account, or France, where immigrants are routinely stopped on buses and trains. There is no national identity card in Britain as there is in other European countries, and there is work to be had.

Britain is trying to discourage illegal immigrants and to make its borders less penetrable. On top of visa requirements introduced in the 1980s and fines on airlines carrying improperly documented passengers, the government has introduced $5,000-a-head fines on employers hiring illegal immigrants and, in April, $3,000-a-head fines on truck drivers transporting them.

But immigration experts say this has hardly deterred immigrants who can earn from 10 to 30 times as much as they can earn back home, or the traffickers who are making a killing.

“The more barriers you put up, the more this encourages the involvement of criminals and organized crime,” said John Morrison, author of a U.N. High Commission for Refugees report on human trafficking released last week.

Times staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris and Carol J. Williams in Berlin, researchers Christian Retzlaff in Berlin, Maria de Cristofaro in Rome and special correspondents Maria Petrakis in Greece and Cristina Mateo in Madrid contributed to this report.