TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051490/0514207.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.1 KB | 248 lines

                [                                                              BUSINESS, Page 70

The Price of Freedom


Immigration laws are fueling a lucrative black market in human
cargo

By RICHARD BEHAR


    Shortly before midnight on April 7, a chartered Boeing 707
took off from the Dominican Republic, bound for Montreal.
Inside the cabin rode 47 Chinese, all of them sitting
comfortably in the first-class section. The cockpit crew
thought they were VIPs, but as soon as the plane was in the
air, the passengers began shredding the fake British Hong Kong
passports that had got them this far and took turns flushing
the illegal documents down the toilets. Upon arrival, the
passengers -- mainland Chinese citizens who had paid as much as
$20,000  each for their journey to freedom -- pleaded for
refugee status to immigration agents, who promptly arrested
them. Never before had so many illegal aliens been nabbed
trying to enter Canada in such grand style.

    The alleged mastermind of this scheme was a man who knows
a good business opportunity when he sees one: Panama's Manuel
Antonio Noriega. U.S. immigration officials suspect that the
47 aliens were ultimately headed for New York City's Chinatown
and were customers of a lucrative passport-for-sale racket run
for several years by Noriega and his cronies. If the deposed
strongman was truly a "people-smuggling" kingpin as a sideline
to his alleged drug-trafficking business, he was simply cashing
in on the upper niche of an industry that is booming at every
level. In March federal agents in Atlanta raided an Eastern
Airlines flight twice in two days, seizing 100 illegal aliens,
including several Romanians who had paid $6,000 apiece for a
secret twelve-day odyssey through such cities as East Berlin,
Havana and Mexico City.

    Borne into the U.S. on private jets, inside the scuzzy
trunks of old cars or even on flimsy rubber rafts equipped with
cellular phones, the shipments of human cargo are surging. The
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was supposed to stem
this tide, mostly by beefing up enforcement and nabbing
employers who hire these aliens. But the number of illegals
apprehended by federal agents, 954,000 in 1989, is suddenly
rising sharply. In a perverse way, IRCA has enhanced the
smuggling trade by motivating undocumented aliens to plan their
trips more carefully. Result: up to half the estimated 3
million illegals entering the U.S. successfully each year --
perhaps 25% of them permanently -- are now smuggler assisted.
The sordid trade reaps as much as $1 billion in annual revenues
and uses such tools as safe-house hotels, bribes, fake
documents and even involuntary servitude.

    From Guatemala to Thailand to Mexico, smugglers brazenly
promote their services in newspapers or on radio stations. In
Manila former U.S. embassy employees advertise their own
smuggling operation on storefronts right across from the
embassy. As in any other industry, a global pricing system has
evolved. At the top: Chinese citizens from Taiwan, Hong Kong
or the People's Republic, who generally pay $20,000 to $38,000
apiece. At the bottom: Mexicans and Dominicans, who are brought
into the U.S. for $50 to $1,000. "It's a sliding scale
depending on how far you travel and how familiar you are with
the system," says David Simcox of the Center for Immigration
Studies. Adds Douglas Massey, an immigration expert and
sociologist at the University of Chicago: "I don't think
Congress intended to create a black market, but it seems that
IRCA's only impact has been to increase the efficiency and the
cost of illegal entry."

    Several major people-smuggling cases show how rewarding the
business has become. Just since 1988, authorities have arrested
30 smugglers along the U.S.-Canadian border. The top gun: Cheng
Chui-Ping, 41, a woman who was nabbed in Vancouver in December.
Cheng, who began life as a peasant in southern China's Fujian
province, has allegedly built a $30 million fortune by
smuggling thousands of Chinese into New York City. Cheng has
gone free on $50,000 bail, and officials fear that she is back
in business. "Cheng is the biggest we've ever arrested, but
she's not even at the top of her own organization," says Bruce
Nicholl, head of Operation Dragon, a major probe by the
Immigration and Naturalization Service into Asian people
smuggling.

    The Noriega scheme may have been even larger than Cheng's.
The INS believes former top officers of the Panama Defense
Forces sold Panamanian immigration documents to refugees from
both China and Cuba in a scam that netted them more than $300
million since 1985. These U.S.-bound refugees paid as much as
$10,000 for a tourist visa, plus an additional  $10,000 to
$15,000 for a Panamanian passport. Among the implicated
schemers is Noriega's cousin Ciro Noriega Quintero, the former
Panamanian consul general to Hong Kong. "Manuel Noriega was the
king of alien smuggling," says Robert Penland, who retired last
month as the INS's assistant commissioner for antismuggling.
"When he was deposed, there were 12,000 Chinese and 4,000
Cubans just stranded in the pipeline in Panama." Since then,
other smuggling organizations have moved in to pick up the
slack.

    Not all aliens can afford to travel in style. INS agents
recently discovered contracts that detail the terms of
involuntary servitude involving poor Chinese aliens in New York
City. In Mexico aliens who try to cross the border on foot are
often robbed, sometimes by policemen who then turn them in, for
payoffs of $30 to $40 per head, to smuggling organizations that
take the aliens into the U.S. For this reason, many aliens
arriving in Los Angeles from Mexico no longer carry cash.
Instead, they are held hostage until smuggling fees are paid
by relatives. The smugglers typically cram 20 to 30 aliens in
each padlocked room for days on end, leaving them to sleep and
defecate on the floor. Occasionally, their heads are shaved in
order to subjugate them. "It's human cargo, one of the most
despicable things on the face of the earth," says Gerald
Klippness, a Los Angeles INS official. "These aliens don't have
any idea what's in store for them."

    Some smugglers actually capitalize on specific IRCA
programs. Max Dulay, a travel agent in Manila, earned $3
million bringing 300 to 400 Filipinos into the U.S. over a
two-year period ending with his arrest in 1988. Dulay cashed
in on the Special Agricultural Workers program, which gave
legal status to farm workers who could claim at least 90 days
of employment in the U.S. prior to 1986. Dulay used fake
passports to bring small groups of Filipinos to Los Angeles
(and sometimes to New York City and Chicago). He then
transported them to a farm in central California for an
extensive orientation program that included physicals, a
package of back-dated documents, tours of farms and briefings
on how to answer questions from Immigration agents. Overall,
the SAW program attracted 1.3 million applicants, as many as
90% of them fraudulent.

    Even so, IRCA supporters insist that the law has helped
solve the problem. Since 1987, IRCA has allowed 3 million
undocumented aliens to obtain legal status. During that time,
the number of aliens captured annually fell by half, from a
peak of 1.8 million in 1986. Although supporters applaud this
as proof that would-be illegals are staying home, a more
plausible explanation is that the legalization program helped
to augment -- not reduce -- the illicit flow. Even more telling,
the influx is rising once again. Since December, the INS'
monthly apprehension figures are averaging 50% higher than the
year before. "It's getting back to business as usual," warns
Arthur Helton, an immigration expert at the Lawyers Committee
for Human Rights.

    IRCA was also supposed to increase the ranks of
border-patrol agents within the INS to as many as 6,000.
Congress never provided the funding, however, and today's 3,800
agents are overworked and demoralized. INS agents are now up
in arms over a proposed reorganization scheme that will merge
the prestigious antismuggling units into the larger
bureaucracy. "Here in Los Angeles, the alien capital of America,
the Act has had no impact in deterring smuggling," asserts
Thomas Gaines, a 30-year INS veteran who retired recently as
head of the largest antismuggling unit. "Enforcement is an
absolute disaster, and we don't have anywhere near the
personnel we need. As for the reorganization, many insiders
just see this as a disguise for cutting costs even further."

    IRCA set fines and jail terms for employers who knowingly
hire illegal aliens, but the law is a sieve. It requires only
that the boss examine any two of 17 proofs of citizenship, some
of which, baptismal certificates for example, have thousands
of acceptable variations. This has produced a cottage industry
in bogus documents. The INS, which estimates that more than
500,000 aliens have used fake papers, is now confiscating more
than 10,000 such documents annually (plus 5,000 smuggler-owned
cars) just at the main San Diego border crossing. Illegals
without fake documents often work instead at newly
proliferating sweatshops. A recent Government study estimates
that as many as 7,000 sweatshops operate in New York City and
Los Angeles alone. "Before IRCA, at least we had the semblance
of competition in the workplace," says Muzaffar Chishti, an
immigration specialist with the International Ladies' Garment
Workers' Union. "Now, many illegal workers are segregated to
sweatshops where employers hold them at their mercy."

    Those employers who openly defy the INS often find that it
has no teeth. Since 1986, the INS has fined roughly 5,000
employers, but a study by the Rand Corp. and the Urban
Institute shows that the average penalty was a mere $850 in an
alien-saturated city like San Antonio. No employers anywhere
in the U.S. have gone to jail for breaking that law. Even the
smugglers have little to fear: a six-month suspended sentence
is typical for a first offense, while some violators get only
probation. "U.S. attorneys along the border plea-bargain these
cases away," says immigration expert Simcox. "A smuggler often
gets off with the confiscation of his vehicle, which is seen
as just a cost of doing business." In the case of Filipino
smuggler Dulay, federal agents seized $165,000 in his savings
account, plus four cars. Dulay was sentenced to 21 months in
jail and will probably go free in August.

    Is there a solution to alien-smuggling that won't bleed
taxpayers? Only one: Let more aliens in. Illegals now make up
as much as 6% of the U.S. work force. Some immigration experts,
most notably Julian Simon, a professor of business at the
University of Maryland, predict that as the baby boomers age
and the birthrate falls, the labor market will tighten and
"employers will cry out for workers." The Kennedy-Simpson bill
being considered by the House sets an annual "flexible" cap of
about 630,000 legal immigrants per year, far less than the U.S.
economy could absorb. Moreover, several new books refute the
contention that immigrants displace U.S. workers or burden the
welfare system. According to recent studies, immigrants are
more likely than U.S.-born citizens to start new businesses.
If so many people are desperate to enter the U.S. by any means
possible, then the best way to fight the black market in human
cargo is to open up more legitimate means of entry.


____________________________________________________________ THE
HIGH COST OF LEAVING


    The price smugglers charge for transporting aliens to the
U.S. depends on several factors. Among them:

    -- The distance of travel to the U.S.

    -- The degree of difficulty in escaping the original
country.

    -- The relative wealth of most aliens seeking to leave that
country, as well as the ability of relatives in the U.S. to
help pay.

    -- The familiarity of aliens with the smuggling system. If
they know how it works, the price is apt to be lower.

    -- The availability of work in the U.S. If a job is waiting,
the price is higher.