The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Though the executive order was prompted by the events at Tiananmen, the breadth of the provision led to the de facto result that any fertile Chinese person, whether a parent or not, suddenly became a potential political refugee in the United States. Snakeheads and the uneducated migrants who made up their clientele had always shown an ingenious knack for identifying loopholes in immigration law, but the 1990 directive was an unambiguous invitation: the Bush administration had announced a posture of deference to asylum claims brought by individuals fleeing a nationwide planned birth policy in the largest country in the world. Bush’s effort to placate anti-China Republicans in Congress could amount, perversely, to a free pass to a fifth of the world’s population. The effects of the order were unmistakable; in 1992 political asylum was granted to roughly 85 percent of the undocumented Chinese immigrants who requested it, a rate almost three times higher than for immigrants from other countries. “The Fujianese thank two people,” a Chinatown real estate broker who emigrated in the 1980s observed. “One is Cheng Chui Ping. And one is George Bush the father.”

  Word of the change in American policy spread to the smallest villages of rural Fujian. If you could set foot on American soil, even if you had phony documents, or no documents at all, no matter how obvious it was that you had made the trip illegally, you were entitled to a hearing of your asylum claims. And if you uttered the words one-child ‘policy and rehearsed a tale of woe—a tale the snakeheads began coaching their passengers to commit to memory and recite on command—there was a good chance the Americans would let you stay. The other word of choice was democracy, and many Fujianese who had never felt any particular commitment to democratic freedoms, who had never been to Tiananmen Square or even to Beijing, claimed that they or their friends or their family members had played some role in the protests. It was said in New York’s Chinatown that some of the actual student leaders from Beijing, who had been offered asylum and prestigious fellowships at universities in the United States, would come to town from time to time to make a little money, charging would-be asylees a few hundred dollars to pose alongside them for Polaroid pictures, which could then be included in an application as proof of involvement in the democracy movement. The number of Chinese nationals arriving at JFK Airport in New York who requested asylum jumped from 205 in 1988 to 1,287 in 1990—an increase of over 500 percent—and continued to grow. The peculiar dynamics of America’s abortion politics that created the loophole were of little interest to the emigrants. What mattered was getting to America and making your claim. The Fujianese countryside was suddenly gripped by a fever to leave, an epidemic of outmigration. “Everybody went crazy,” a Sing Tao Daily journalist reported from Fuzhou in the mid-nineties. “The area was in a frenzy. Farmers put down their tools, students discarded their books, workers quit their jobs, and everybody was talking about nothing but going to America.”

  Over the past half-century more refugees have found new homes in America than in any other country in the world. In the past thirty-five years alone the United States has welcomed some 2.6 million people fleeing famine, persecution, and upheaval. In fact, of the top thirteen countries accepting refugees in 2005, the United States took in two times as many refugees as the next twelve countries on the list combined. Haunted by the memory of the St. Louis, an ocean liner carrying nearly a thousand Jewish refugees that came within sight of Florida during the spring of 1939, only to be turned away by the United States and sent back to Europe, where many of the passengers subsequently perished in the Holocaust, the United States has at least in principle embraced the notion of asylum. The United Nations established a convention in 1951 and a protocol in 1967 to guide governments in the formulation of national legislation on refugee and asylum issues. But the system for determining who should or should not be granted refuge in this country was codified only in 1980, when Congress passed a sweeping new refugee law in response to a surge of displaced people from around the world—Haitians, Soviet Jews, Southeast Asians unmoored by the wars in Cambodia and Vietnam. More people were seeking permanent resettlement outside their homelands in 1979 than at any time since the end of the Second World War. With the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress replaced a system that had been largely ad hoc and prone to favor refugees from some countries over others with a uniform test: anyone who could show a “well-founded fear” of persecution in the country they were fleeing would be eligible for resettlement in the United States.

  Still, in drafting the new law, the legislators focused primarily on refugees outside the United States who might bring their claims to American embassies abroad. They were less concerned with asylum-seekers—people who have already managed to get to America and ask for legal refuge once they’re here. The law envisioned admitting some 50,000 refugees per year, but it projected only 5,000 asylum cases. Almost immediately it became clear that this was an extreme underestimate. Just as the law came into force, the Mariel boat lift was transporting tens of thousands of Cubans to Miami in the spring and summer of 1980. That event alone generated 50,000 requests for asylum. Within three years authorities were contending with a backlog of 170,000 asylum applications from people from 53 different countries. By the time the Bush executive order made China’s one-child policy a ground for asylum in the United States, America’s immigration system was already flooded with nearly 100,000 new applications each year, and the accumulated backlog of unresolved asylum claims had reached a quarter of a million cases.

  The backlog meant that new arrivals could not have their asylum applications processed immediately. If you showed up at an American airport in the early 1990s and explained that you didn’t have a passport or visa but you wanted to apply for asylum, it took a minimum of four months before you actually had a preliminary hearing in front of a judge, and it was often over a year after that before the actual facts of your case were heard. Immigration officials didn’t have the resources to detain asylum-seekers during this protracted process, so they issued undocumented arrivals with work authorization forms, asked them to report to a judge on a given date, and sent them on their way. Many of them never showed up to have their claims heard, walking out of the airport and disappearing into the underground economy.

  The INS had historically been a kind of stepchild of American law enforcement—terminally understaffed and underfunded, painfully jealous of its sibling agency, customs, which seemed flush with cash by comparison (because all those seizures actually made money), and generally embittered about the Sisyphean nature of the work it was asked to do. Gene McNary who ran the INS from 1989 to 1993, described it as “the agency that nobody cared about—dumped on, dirty-faced kids.” The INS was laughably unprepared for the sudden onrush of asylum-seekers. Where the smugglers ran sophisticated transnational operations, with ever-evolving distribution networks, transshipment points in corrupt Central American countries, savvy Fujianese strategists who studied and exploited American immigration law, and liaisons and brokers from Beijing to Bangkok to Boston, the INS was cash-strapped and plodding, hidebound and slavishly hierarchical. At an organizational level, the agency was the exact opposite of the snakeheads: in its focus, activities, and sphere of influence, it was a domestic law enforcement agency striving for relevance in a world of global migration flows. And above all it was slow to change, unable to adapt to circumstances as they evolved.

  Bill Slattery, the INS’s district director for New York, complained bitterly about America’s asylum policies, arguing that the Chinese were taking advantage of our forgiving system. Like many immigration officials who encountered the surge of Chinese asylum-seekers at first hand, Slattery worried that Bush’s executive order had created a magnet for illegal immigration—an opportunity so irresistible that it would lure potential migrants who might otherwise never have left China. When he took the job in New York, in 1990, he looked over the records for the previous year and was outraged to learn that of the four thousand “inadmissibles” intercepted at Kennedy Airport, only eighty-seven had ultimately been deported
. “The aliens have taken control,” he warned. “The Third World has packed its bag, and it’s moving.”

  Slattery thought of the aliens at JFK as a “swarm”—a calculated ensemble maneuver, designed to overwhelm the United States. He wanted to begin summarily excluding any asylum applicants from China who had come to America by way of a third country. After all, the snakehead routes often brought migrants through numerous cities in Asia, Europe, or South America before they reached the United States. If they were really fleeing tyranny in China, why not stay in one of those intermediate locations? “If I have someone from China who has been through six or seven countries before finally asking for asylum when they hit JFK, I don’t see why I should have to admit them,” he told a reporter in 1993.

  If a certain xenophobia seemed to lurk around the edges of Slattery’s public pronouncements during those years, it was also the case that he was panicked, and justifiably so, by the migration explosion he was witnessing and being asked to contain. At JFK, the fluorescent-lit lobbies and grubby linoleum floors were overrun with undocumented arrivals. Twelve million people passed through the airport every year, roughly half of them not U.S. citizens. Out of those, the INS identified some eight thousand illegal immigrants in 1991, or more than twenty each day. That was just the number they caught; there were surely many more who managed to slip by undetected. And by 1992 the number apprehended nearly doubled. Many of the Chinese who arrived did so with no documents at all, having trashed their passports and visas in the airplane bathroom, knowing that it would be harder for U.S. authorities to turn them away if they arrived without a passport denoting their country of origin or a visa for their destination. Immigration officials called them “flushers.” Who could the United States return them to? “Prove to us that they’re Chinese,” Beijing would say when the INS tried to turn over inadmissibles from China. “There are ethnic Chinese all over the world. How do we know these come from China?” Each time an arrival was found to have improper documents or no documents at all, the airline that brought him was fined $3,000. In 1992 the United States fined airlines $20 million for delivering undocumented or badly documented passengers to U.S. airports. Half of those passengers came through JFK.

  The airport had a small immigration detention facility, a bleak converted warehouse run by a private company, but the space had just over a hundred beds. So even inadmissibles who had clearly arrived illegally tended to be released pending resolution of their asylum claims. “It’s not like they’re trying to avoid apprehension,” Slattery would complain. “They know they’re going to be intercepted at the airport, and they also recognize that we’re not going to be able to hold them.” Someone could arrive at JFK without a passport, request political asylum, and be sent on his way, all within a matter of hours. The snakeheads knew this. They coached their customers to tear up their passports before they touched down in New York and to demand asylum at the airport. They were so confident in this routine that they would show up at the airport to meet the customers and brazenly hang out in the arrivals lounge of the international terminal. The snakeheads were easy to spot: they all carried cell phones, still an uncommon accoutrement in the early 1990s.

  Immigration officials marveled at the tenacity and adaptability of the Fujianese; Mexican border-crossers, the traditional targets of the INS and the Border Patrol, looked hopelessly amateur by comparison. The Fujianese flew into JFK, into Toronto, into Vancouver, San Diego, San Francisco. When they couldn’t fly directly to North America, they obtained visas, and often passports, from corrupt Central American way stations where the snakeheads had developed a stronghold—Belize, Guatemala, Panama—and flew there, then crossed the border in Texas, Arizona, or California. One Hong Kong triad, the Sun Yee On, was said to have arranged an operation in which its members chartered jets and sent whole planeloads of illegal Chinese to Belize, from which they could continue overland through Mexico. Authorities referred to this operation as “the Chinese charter.” INS agents often heard stories about Chinese migrants crossing the border from Mexico, but their apprehension rate of Chinese was always very low compared to that of the Mexicans they stopped every day. One reason for this, it emerged, was that snakeheads at the border were paying poor Mexicans to run across en masse as a diversionary tactic to tie up the migras while the Fujianese migrants strolled across unnoticed. By the 1990s, the smuggling fee for Fujianese was $30,000; a few hundred dollars for the Mexicans, who were happy to take the money and get caught, only to be released back into Mexico and cross another day, was a sensible operational expense.

  It is the nature of illicit economies that their numbers are incredibly imprecise, and it may be impossible to arrive at any reliable tabulation of the number of Fujianese who came to the United States illegally in the years after Tiananmen Square. But even the low estimates are extraordinary. In the midnineties, a federal working group on Chinese alien smuggling concluded that some 50,000 Fujianese were coming illegally every year. But James Woolsey who was director of the CIA at that time, told Congress that the number of Chinese being smuggled in each year was closer to 100,000. One senior immigration official said in the early nineties that “at any given time, thirty thousand Chinese are stashed away in safe houses around the world, waiting for entry” to the United States. Sources within China’s own Public Security Bureau put that number at half a million: 15,000 in Ho Chi Minh City, 25,000 in Bangkok, 10,000 in Brazil, and so on. The NYPD estimated that in the New York area alone, some three hundred safe houses were holding recently arrived illegals. One expert on the snakehead trade told a Senate subcommittee that by the early nineties the business was bringing in $3.2 billion a year. (That would make it roughly comparable to the Gap or Sun Microsystems during the same period.) Other estimates place the annual revenue from the snakehead trade much higher; some officials eventually suggested that the industry brought in as much as $7 billion a year. According to Peter Kwong, a leading scholar of American Chinatowns and the history of the Chinese in America, the largest number of illegal Chinese in history entered the United States between 1988 and 1993.

  One beneficiary of America’s new asylum policy toward the Chinese was Ah Kay. After he was deported to China and then returned to New York, authorities attempted to deport him again, in 1991. But he applied for political asylum on the grounds that he had somehow been affiliated with the pro-democracy movement in China, and remarkably, despite being a convicted felon who had already been deported once, he was released and permitted to stay in the country while the authorities evaluated his claims.

  On his journey back to America after the first deportation, Ah Kay had traveled via Belize, where he encountered a Taiwanese smuggler named Lo Cho. Lo Cho’s particular specialty was boats. It is not entirely clear when the snakeheads first started using boats to transport customers to the United States. Most people in New York’s Chinatown date the advent of boat smuggling to the early 1990s, and the first boat that was apprehended by U.S. authorities was a Taiwanese fishing trawler, the I-Mao No. 306, which was captured off the coast of Southern California in 1991 with 118 Chinese on board. But an INS Anti-Smuggling Unit memo from 1985 indicated that even at that point migrants were traveling from China “by cargo ship to the western coast of Mexico.”

  In the minds of the snakeheads, humans were ultimately a form of cargo like any other, subject to the economies of scale. Sending passengers on planes meant paying for expensive tickets and for legitimate or fraudulent passports and visas. In some cases, a snakehead who charged $25,000 to send a customer by plane ended up netting only $5,000 after covering all the relevant expenses. When the snakeheads realized that Fujianese demand for passage to America was so insatiable that they could oblige their customers to forgo the comforts of economy class for conditions that better resembled freight and shift the business from a retail model to a wholesale one without actually lowering the going $30,000 rate, they turned to boats. Specifically, to Taiwanese boats. Fishing vessels had been smuggling people and goods ba
ck and forth across the strait between Fujian and Taiwan for centuries, and the shift to maritime human smuggling was facilitated by a Taiwanese connection.

  Nobody knows how organized or centralized the Taiwanese were, and rumors persist on the streets of Chinatown and in law enforcement circles about faceless, nameless Taiwanese kingpins who sent a flotilla of smuggling ships to the United States and pocketed a disproportionate share of the profits, but who were sophisticated and politically connected enough to avoid capture, or even identification, by authorities. What is clear is that while the boats may have flown different flags and found their way to ports around the world, most of them started life as fishing vessels in Taiwan. Some have connected the advent of boat smuggling to Taiwan’s agreement in 1991 to a ban on drift-net fishing, which left a fleet of oceangoing vessels suddenly obsolete, unable to perform their traditional function and ripe for reassignment. The snakeheads called the boats “buckets,” in a nod to the unadorned utility of the vessels they favored. To get a bucket, you saw the “bucket man.” And the bucket men were all from Taiwan.