"The most developed and best organized of all the Chinese smuggling routes leads to the United States. In testimony before Congress in 1994, then-director of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) James Woolsey Jr. claimed, according to his office's study, that some 100,000 Chinese are being smuggled into America each year. Many are sent first through Belize, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, or other countries in Central America and the Caribbean region. But, for the most, the road starts in Fuzhou and ends in New York." (page 75)
"These days, smugglers insist on the full payment before releasing the illegals. They prefer to shift the responsibility of keeping track of the debt payments to other enforcement parties, be they relatives, local gangs, local loan sharks or village associations. Indeed, they often insist that the final payment be completed in China, in order to avoid the need to launder their money in the United States and thus risk detection by the authorities. This means that the relatives of the smuggled aliens have to transfer their funds back to China through illegitimate money-laundering services in China. An illegal immigrant held in New York is released only after a phone call from the snaketail in China confirms the completion of the transaction.
"The worst abuses of illegal immigrants occur in New York safe houses while they wait for their relatives to come up with the final payment." (page 81)
"The police claim that there are some 300 safe houses holding newcomers in New York City. They are usually located in basement cellars, and all illegals have to spend some time in one before being released. The immigrants are obliged to eat, sleep, and urinate in the same place as more than a dozen inmates, all of whom are confined to one room. They are starved, deprived of fresh air and sunlight, and beaten regularly. At times they are ordered to inflict pain on each other. Many are shackled and handcuffed to metal bed frames. Males are told that they could be killed; the females are threatened with work in a whorehouse.
"Some men have in fact been killed to set an example to others, and girls have in fact been forced to work in massage parlors for years without pay; others end up locked in during the day and forced to work in gambling joints at night. One thing the smugglers always make sure of is that their victims do not dare to inform the authorities or testify against them in court -- not even to talk about their experience with other illegals. They are never allowed to forget that the smugglers control the whole community. They should see no evil, hear no evil and mind their own business after their release." (page 82)
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Chapter 4, The Limits of Kinship Networks
"The strong sense of family and kinship loyalty that underlies group migration should not be seen purely in cultural and moral terms, because it is ultimately informed by an explicit economic rationale. Bringing family members into the migration chain is seen by the Cantonese and Fuzhounese as a chance to extend their economic power, either by bringing in a relative as a business partner or as cheap labor. To the Chinese in America who came early, Fuzhounese immigrants represent the rock bottom of the economic ladder in the community. They can only move upward if they accumulate some capital, and for that Fuzhounese need cheap and dependable labor. Their kin back home are the ideal candidates." (page 93)
"What the Fuzhounese are caught up in, however, is not a normal rural and kinship-based migration chain. Their migration has been helped by an organized human smuggling network, whose only concern is making a profit -- not maintaining family ties and kinship unity. The network is interested in the Fuzhounese as potential clients only if two critical conditions exist: one, the client can pay; two, the client can be trusted to keep the operation secret from law enforcement." (page 95)
"In China, family members of Fuzhounese immigrants have a very different understanding of the smugglers and the conditions in America than might be expected of an exploited population. Those who are waiting to emigrate look to the smugglers as the providers of an essential service.... When I confronted the relatives of illegals in China with accounts of torture, kidnapping, rape, and other abuses perpetrated by the snakeheads, they usually responded that the snakeheads have every right to punish those who are lazy and unwilling to pay off their debts. In a way, the snakeheads have already immunized the Fuzhounese from being critical of the human smuggling process.
"After years of this type of indoctrination, the Fuzhounese in China have come to believe that America is a land of opportunity, where anyone can work for two years to pay off their smuggling debts and then, in a couple of more years, buy a business. Those unable to do so are considered, mei-zu-shi, useless and lacking in ambition. Even those family members not expecting to come to this country want to make sure the migration project succeeds so that their future in China will be assured by overseas remittances.
Of course, the Fuzhounese in America know that the snakeheads are far from perfect, but are too intimidated to challenge them. They cannot fight back lest they jeopardize the chances of other family members to make the trip. Besides, their relatives in China are vulnerable. The snakeheads could threaten family members there with violence or extortion. This kind of situation is taken seriously because local authorities are not likely to intervene.
"More than anything, however, they keep quiet in order to maintain their 'face" and family honor." (pages 96-97)
"As more Fuzhounese come, the debts are accumulating, and will eventually reach a point where the indigenous community will no longer be able to service their debt...."(page 97)
"By 1992 the influx of Fuzhounese illegals had reached a saturation point. Members in the community were having increasing difficulty raising the smuggling funds. To counter this trend, the snakeheads tried to squeeze more out of the illegals and their relatives by force. Kidnapping and torturing of illegals was the inevitable consequence." (page 98)
"As the hardship of debt burden increases, more Fuzhounese are being forced into crime. The civic order of the Chinatown community is sliding into chaos." (page 99-100)
"With the flood of desperate, undocumented aliens willing to work under any circumstances, Chinese employers are in the position to depress labor conditions to the limits. Wages in the Chinatown garment industry, already low by American standards before the arrival of the Fuzhounese, have declined even further." (page 101)
"Not surprisingly, the illegals have the best chances of getting and keeping a job. The employers like them for being young, committed, and willing to work long hours, and for their docility and uncomplaining nature. Some employers are only interested in undocumented workers. Longtime residents must either follow their example or lose their jobs. Thus employers have effectively erased the distinctions between legal and illegal immigrant workers. It is not surprising that the Chinese legal immigrants resent the undocumented interlopers, who they say have marginalized everybody's labor and worsened everybody's conditions...." (pages 102-103)
"After several years of working like machines, twelve hours a day and seven days a week, some Fuzhounese illegals begin to develop physical ailments...." (pages 105)
"Yet what Chinese workers fear most -- next to having their wages withheld -- is getting sick. Especially the illegal workers, for whom not being able to work is like death." (pages 106)
"The Fuzhounese work so hard that they barely have a family life to speak of. A husband and wife who both work twelve to fourteen hours a day can hardly see each other. Having children is next to impossible...." (pages 107-108)
"School dropout rates among the Fuzhounese (children) are high. Many of the frustrated dropouts are easily recruited into gangs to become enforcers and drug runners. Without the help of an extended family, without free time, without English, and without education of their own, the immigrant Fuzhounese illegals are incapable of fulfilling the responsibilities of being good parents. In fact, many of the Fuzhounese families are dysfunctional -- a bitter irony, since strong family ties are what brought the Fuzhounese to America to begin with." (pages 110-111)
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Chapter 5, Manufacturing Ethnicity
"The shocking, indentured slave-like conditions of the Fuzhounese illegals are not a new and sudden development. They are merely the next step down in a continuously deteriorating and already horrendous labor environment within the ethnic Chinese enclave. Unlike other immigrant workers, such as the Mexicans who work for Korean green groceries, the Ecuadorians who work for Cuban garment factories, and the Polish illegals who work for Irish construction companies, few Chinese are employed in an open and competitive labor market. Although the other illegals generally have to cope with low wages, long hours, undesirable and dangerous jobs, and contend with employers who manipulate their productivity by playing on their fear of deportation, their predicament never reaches the level of misery and degree of control perpetrated by Chinese employers on Chinese workers within Chinese enclaves, beyond the scrutiny of American society." (page 113)
"It is common to meet Chinatown residents who, having lived in the United States for more than twenty-five years, are not able to communicate in simple English. This, in addition to the fact that there are few jobs outside the enclave, closes out the option for Chinese immigrants to break out of the ethnic immigrant community, where they remain trapped and vulnerable to the power of Chinese employers. The very existence of ethnic enclaves like Chinatown inhibits new immigrants' attempts to look for other options. The options for Fuzhounese illegals outside the Chinese environment are even more limited. This suits the Chinese employers just fine. In fact, they try to promote the ideology of ethnic solidarity to reinforce Chinese dependency on the ethnic enclaves." (pages 116-117)
"Because of this isolation, the Chinese employers are able to impart to their workers the image of a hostile and racist American society, which helps to construct a sense of 'ethnic solidarity'....
"Chinese workers are instructed not to fight Chinese owners, but to appreciate that they are all victims of an unjust, racist system." (page 121)
"Today, the class nature of Chinatown's political structure remains basically unchanged. Local power is still concentrated in the hands of factory owners, merchants, and landlords who are able to impose their personal interests through their official positions in the associations....
"Of the two hundred or so listed family, clan, surname, village, county, tong, and social welfare organizations in Chinatown, practically none represent the interests of the working people....
"Monopolizing the political, economic, and social structure of Chinatown, the merchant elite are recognized as 'community leaders' by outsiders as well. So whenever the mayor's office, federal officials, or law enforcement authorities want to reach out to the Chinese community, they address it through the Chinatown elite. The elite's hegemonic power is therefore complete." (pages 126-127)
"The association leaders' public position is not at all critical of the human smuggling business. A senior member of one of the Fuzhounese associations once told me, 'You should not look down on the snakeheads; they are, after all, providing a useful service. Many of them are helping their suffering countrymen to get out of China. Illegals appreciate their help. But it's like any businesses; some are good and some are bad.' To describe an industry that reaps huge profits by forcing thousands of people into a hellish existence as a normal business is preposterous. Unless of course, you are so compromised by your own dealing with the snakeheads that you no longer see clearly or care about what is happening to your own people." (page 129)
"Chinese reporters are regularly warned not to cover 'unfavorable information regarding the Chinese community.' When a Chinese newspaper reporter translated a court indictment against a tong leader that had been printed in The New York Times, the tong leader himself called the Chinese-language paper two days later to complain and threaten retaliation. The editor of the paper ordered the reporter to apologize to the tong leader in person or be fired." (page 133)
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Chapter 6, The Exclusion of Chinese Labor
" The majority of the Chinese in Chinatown today are no longer self-employed operators of businesses. They are truly working class, employed by others. Chinatowns have, in effect, been transformed from small-business ghettos into working-class neighborhoods and manufacturing centers. Although most residents now hold manufacturing and service jobs, they are working under an ethnic subcontracting system. They are still isolated in their own ethnic community, exploited by their own ethnic elite, and continue to work in conditions below American labor standards." (pages 158-159)
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Chapter Seven, Ineffectual Enforcement of Immigration and Labor Law
"The large and persistent influx of undocumented aliens has led to the emergence of involuntary servitude, as a result of exorbitant fees charged by the sophisticated human smuggling networks, which has in turn led to the brutal exploitation of the illegals by employers violating American labor laws." (page 162-163)
"The use of Chinese illegals has already devalued the labor of legal Chinese workers in Chinatown. Their continued influx through a back-door subcontracting system into the mainstream labor markets -- from garment and restaurant trades to the electronic, construction, trucking and farm industries -- threatens to erode the wages of all other American laborers as well. Such practices are already setting low working standards for other third world immigrants.
"Worse is the virtual indentured slavery of the illegal aliens, which has generated little public outrage even as it has spread among immigrants of many ethnic backgrounds." (page 163)
"...the Fuzhounese who have already made money from the human smuggling trade now act as 'bankers,' extending loans to the illegals with which to pay their snakeheads and thus maintain the cash flow and profitability of the human smuggling trade." (page 168)
"...illegals are reluctant to change jobs and risk new problems with new employers, and are thus tied down to narrow options." (page 174)
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Chapter 8, Waiting for Organized Labor
"To organize the rank and file in the Chinese community -- without resources, without political power, without the help of larger American society -- is close to impossible. But when unionized workers have a problem with an employer and the existing American union refuses to intervene, they have nowhere to turn -- certainly not to the traditional Chinese associations nor the social welfare agencies, which usually avoid antagonizing Chinatown's business community so as not to threaten their funding sources." (pages 199-200)
"It is especially difficult to mobilize female Chinese workers.... They tend not to believe that they can accomplish things by themselves nor that what they do will make a difference." (page 201)
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Chapter 9, The Undocumented Immigrant as Part of American Labor
"One does not have to be a racist or a nativist to appreciate the downward pressure the low-skilled immigrants exert on American wage levels. Legal Chinatown residents are the first to point out how the illegal Fuzhounese are hurting their incomes. In this light, it is not surprising that 55 percent of Asian American voters in California supported proposition 187, the measure to restrict benefits to illegal aliens (about the same percentage as in the African American voting pool)." (pages 207-208)
"By recruiting illegals, capital is attacking the weakest link in the American labor chain, because illegal immigrants are the most difficult workers to organize. American labor has always been reluctant to deal with the illegals. A typical view is expressed by an AFL-CIO official: 'Illegals seldom join unions and they almost never go on strike or otherwise complain about their wages or working conditions, because they fear deportation and the return to the poverty in their homeland.'" (pages 208-209)
"Chinatown labor has long been dominated by an ethnic economic elite who controls the community's political structure. This structure has the power to define the laws and regulations inside the enclave. It has the power to represent the community externally and has a commanding influence over the local media. The enclave's workers are fighting against great odds. To break up the ethnic elite's hegemonic power, they need intervention by American authorities, if American laws are to be enforced in the Chinese community. However, all too often, American labor officials have been indifferent to the problems of Chinese workers, blaming their inaction on the passivity of the Chinese." (page 219)
"External intervention will not transform the existing conditions without a community-based workers' movement. The Chinese community has always been divided vertically, along the lines of kinship, village ties, trade, and fraternal organizations; no traditional organization cuts across the class lines, with the result that power remains concentrated exclusively in the hands of the wealthy elite. Yet, the overwhelming majority in the community are working people. If they were to form a union across all trades and reorient themselves to speak up and fight for redress of genuine worker concerns, they would be able to challenge the hegemonic power of their Chinese employers within the enclave." (page 225)
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A Final Note
"A conservative estimate of the number of illegal immigrants currently in the United States is five million, and over 60 percent of them are Mexicans and Central Americans. The number of Fuzhounese illegals is small by comparison, but they are unique. They are victims of a large-scale and sophisticated international human smuggling network. After arrival in the United States, they are forced to work for years under what amounts to indentured servitude to pay off large 'transportation' debts, with constant threats of torture, rape, and kidnapping." (p. 235)
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Copyright 1997 "Forbidden Workers" by Peter Kwong. Reprinted by permission of The New Press.
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