About the author: Peter Kwong is an associate professor of urban affairs and planning and the director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, City University of New York. His works include: "Chinese Americans: The Immigrant Experience" (2000), "Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor" (1997), "The New Chinatown" (1996), and "Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950" (1979).

Chinese organized crime has developed human smuggling into a truly global business, shepherding some one hundred thousand people per year to a range of destinations including Japan, Canada, Australia, the United States, France, Holland, and other parts of Europe. Profits from the Chinese smuggling network are reported to be in the range of $3.1 billion U.S. per year (Kaihla, 1996). However, this human smuggling system can only be sustained on the premise that illegals, once they have arrived in a host country, can secure employment to pay off their debts. Employers will hire them only if their services are cheaper and if they demand fewer benefits and less labor protection than the legal workers. The most important impact of illegals on the host society is, therefore, on its labor supply and labor conditions.

More than two hundred thousand Chinese illegal aliens have arrived in this country during the past two decades (Nin-lung, 1996: 63). Most of them work in a substandard underground economy. They are recruited to serve the needs of the decentralized, restructured American economy. Not only are they cheap, but hiring them serves the important objective of bringing readjustment to the balance of power between labor and capital in this country, established since the 1930s. The destruction of the powerful labor movement that was able to make significant gains in collective bargaining, higher wages, health and retirement benefits, unemployment compensation, and other social welfare safety nets is the chief objective of this new business order in the United States.

The best way to achieve this objective is by hiring the least organized and most vulnerable labor available -- the new immigrants or, better yet, the undocumented aliens who have no protection at all. Therefore the issue of Chinese illegal migration is more of a labor than an immigration problem. As long as there is demand for cheap and pliable labor, there will be jobs for the illegals and a market for human smugglers in which they can go on making huge profits.

Background

The majority of the Chinese illegals have come from the area around the city of Fuzhou in Fujian Province and a smaller portion from the area around the city of Wenzhou in the neighboring Zhejiang Province up north. As the human smuggling network expands in search of new recruits, illegal aliens from other parts of China are slowly entering this flow as well.

Fuzhounese illegals began to arrive in the early 1970s, when Fuzhounese seamen who worked on foreign vessels started jumping ship in New York Harbor (Nin-lung, 1996: 51). Most of them were single men without legal status. Few could become legalized residents. A handful arranged phony marriages with ABC (American-born Chinese) girls, paying them three thousand dollars to go through the ritual of a bogus marriage.

With or without legal status, however, as soon as the seamen became established economically, they started bringing in members of their families from China. This was the beginning of the Fuzhounese human smuggling network: a few primitive, simple schemes concocted by enterprising travel agencies to exploit this eager market of naturalized merchant mariners. The main challenge was transporting the relatives from Hong Kong to New York.

In the late 1960s, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist government opened the border between China and Hong Kong, thinking it might destroy the British colony by flooding it with penniless refugees. Many Fuzhounese with family connections in New York seized the opportunity of this chaotic period to go to Hong Kong, some by swimming across the Shenzhen River. Once in Hong Kong they gained refugee status and were thus entitled to exit visas.

The travel agencies' task was to obtain, usually through bribery, entry visas for the refugees from countries such as Bolivia, Guatemala, or Mexico. When they arrived in those countries, the refugees were then easily escorted across the Mexican border into the United States. During the days when the border controls were at a minimum, the smuggling fee was a mere eighteen hundred dollars.

This route via South America was already well traveled by Taiwanese criminals -- often tax cheats but occasionally including more serious offenders, including embezzlers and violent criminals -- in the 1970s. In fact, the very first illegal Fuzhou emigrants used phony Taiwanese passports. This Central American option became even more popular after 1978, when Deng Xiaoping initiated the liberal "open door policy." After the border controls relaxed, thousands of Fuzhounese illegals arrived in New York.

The modern era of human smuggling began with the passage of the Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). The act contained an amnesty provision granting legal status to all those who could prove that they had resided in the United States as undocumented aliens before January 1, 1982. IRCA was a bonanza for the Fuzhounese illegals already in the U.S. With a stroke of the pen they became legal. Even the would-be illegal immigrants who were still in China could become legal if they arrived in time to hand in their application by November 1988. There were plenty of crooks in Chinatown willing to provide them with the back-dated employment records and tax receipts needed for the application -- if they could come up with five hundred to six hundred dollars.

The result was a mad rush. The Taiwanese crime syndicate, which had made most of its money in the past through heroin trafficking (Hood, 1994), suddenly realized the profit potential in cash-rich, recently legalized Fuzhounese Americans, who were willing to pay almost any amount to get their relatives out of China before the deadline. The syndicate immediately dispatched agents to Fuzhou to build up smuggling networks by hiring locals as recruiters.

Soon the syndicate had muscled in on the operations of the existing small-scale travel agencies in Chinatown, adding its own facilities and a sophisticated, worldwide smuggling network to transform illegal immigration into an international corporate enterprise. It was a low-risk and high-profit operation for the syndicate, which quickly raised smuggling fees tenfold to eighteen thousand dollars per person -- the origin of the New York City street nickname for a Fuzhounese illegal: "the Eighteen Thousand-Dollar Man."

Suddenly, going to the United States became the only topic of conversation in Fuzhou. Stories of this or that lucky neighbor whose relatives in the United States cared enough to pay the smuggling fee spread like wildfire. People knew that if their relatives acted fast enough, they too could obtain legal resident status.

In the aftermath of the Tianenman Massacre in 1989, President George Bush compromised with China's critics by issuing an executive order permitting all Chinese students in the United States to adjust their immigration status so that they could not be forced to return if they faced political repression. In a later order, Executive Order 12711, the president instructed the State and Justice Departments to give "enhanced consideration" to individuals who expressed fear of persecution related to forced abortion or coerced sterilization (Russell, 1995: 39-87). The new order extended the promise of legal status to almost all Fuzhou immigrants, who could now be classified as refugees, fleeing past or threatened persecution by forced abortion and sterilization.

The 1986 IRCA, together with the 1989 and 1990 Bush executive orders, not only gave a huge number of Fuzhounese illegals the opportunity for lawful existence in this country but also assured their relatives of the option of legal immigration. The Fuzhounese evidently had enough seed population to grow through this legal process. But some relatives who could enter the United States legally did not want to wait the usual period which, for, say, the wife of a permanent resident, could be three to four years. For a sibling it could be as long as eight years.

Those who did not have relatives to sponsor their legal immigration were given the hope that once they arrived on American soil they could apply for political asylum based on the Executive Order 12711's provision construing China's one-child policy as "persecution." The information provided by the smuggling network was that the asylum application process would take a long time; once in the country, even those denied asylum could still appeal and easily evade deportation indefinitely. While waiting for their hearings and appeals, the asylum seekers could get legal work permits and a job. Thanks to such convenient legal decisions, the smuggling operation kept expanding. The largest number of Chinese illegals ever entered the United States between 1988 and 1993. The cost of smuggling keeps growing: it had reached $22,000 per person in 1988 and $35,000 in the early 1990s.

During this period, the overall U.S. border surveillance was so lax that the Chinese smugglers used ships to transport aliens across the Pacific and unloaded them directly off American shores, first on the West Coast and then directly off the East Coast, until the Golden Venture incident in the summer of 1993, which shocked the American authorities into action. By 1994, a dozen new routes opened a variety of new staging areas in Central America, Eastern Europe, and the Caribbean (Smith, 1996). Most Chinese illegals no longer traveled by ships but via air and more often than not with "valid" visas-F-1 student visas, H-1 temporary work permits, diplomatic passports, or visas issued for official trade delegations -- provided by the smugglers. So even with the tightened immigration controls intended in the harsh 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the flow of Chinese illegal migration has continued. There are reports of new arrivals every week. Human smugglers are developing new sources of supplies from the central and coastal provinces of Zhejiang, Sichuan, Shandong, and Anhui -- and from wherever there are villages with significant past overseas emigration and wherever there are large enough "seed populations" that have accumulated sufficient capital to support migrant trafficking. In the meantime, the smuggling fee for Fuzhounese has edged up to forty-two thousand dollars.

Most human smuggling systems simply provide assistance in border crossing, like the "coyotes" who charge at most a few hundred dollars for sneaking a client across the U.S.-Mexican border. Chinese smuggling services are much more comprehensive. Their package includes passage out of China, a transit location or locations as the case requires, and transport to a final destination. Their charges are also the highest.

The high fee the smugglers charge has nothing to do with the actual cost of transportation, but that is how much the smugglers can command. To maintain such high profits, Chinese smuggling operators have to enter into complex financial arrangements with their clients that continue even years after the illegals' arrival, because they are being paid by them from income yet to be realized.

In the early stages of the human smuggling industry, some snakeheads extended credit, allowing their clients to pay the debt off in monthly installments. However, as the smuggling business grew, keeping track of credit allowances became a nuisance. In addition, a lengthy involvement with a freely roaming client made brushes with law enforcement more likely. These days, smugglers expect potential illegal immigrants first to raise fifteen hundred dollars in China. On arrival, they will be held in safe houses until all their debts are paid (Chin, 1996).

That amount is usually borrowed from relatives in the United States at 3 percent interest. To pay off, for example, $30,000 in three years means approximately $10,000 a year, or $800 a month. The smugglers prefer to shift the responsibility of keeping track of the debt payments to other parties, be they relatives, local gangs, local loan sharks, or village associations. Still, the perpetuation of this whole smuggling system calls for an overall stable debt-paying environment. The smuggling operators are constantly taking measures to make sure that debts are honored for all parties concerned, even if they are not to them.

Structured Violence

Regular use of violence is one way to instill fear in the minds of the illegals in order to gain their compliance. Smugglers usually pay enforcers to terrorize the illegals during the voyage to the United States. However, 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. To encourage the relatives to raise the funds by borrowing from various sources more quickly, the smuggling networks contract with violent youth gangs. The enforcers begin to abuse the illegals as soon as they arrive at the safe houses, at times forcing them to talk to their relatives on the phone while undergoing torture.

The police claim that there are some three hundred safe houses holding newcomers in New York City (Chan, 1993). 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 one another. 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. 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.

For victims who were unable to pay off their smuggling fees, the snakeheads simply have the unfortunate debtor incarcerated. In 1992, the Brooklyn Police Robbery Squad stumbled upon a human-smuggling scheme while investigating a youth-gang extortion case. When they broke into an apartment building in the Hispanic section of Sunset Park, they found thirteen undocumented Fuzhounese, some of whom had been incarcerated in the cellar for as long as fourteen months. They were virtual slaves to the enforcers, who were members of the Fuching (Fujian Youth) Gang. During the day, the victims worked at restaurants and laundries affiliated with organized crime.

Fear of physical violence, however, is not the only way to extract compliance from indebted illegals. Bringing pressures from members of their families in China is another way.

Illegal Migration as a Family Enterprise

Illegal migration from a poor country like China is a costly proposition. No one individual is capable of initiating exodus without being part of a "family migration project." The project runs like a relay team. The family first pools all its resources and social connections to send one young, capable, and dependable male abroad. In the beginning, he has to work for others in the United States to pay off his debts. The ideal narrative from here on goes like this: once his debts are paid, he begins to save to bring other family members over. He familiarizes himself with his new environment and selects a business that is likely to succeed as a "family enterprise" -- a takeout restaurant, for instance, as is commonly the case with the Fuzhounese. The migration relay begins. The next in line to be sent overseas may be his wife, but most likely it will be a male sibling who will maximize the family's capital accumulation -- a hardworking, "productive" male is preferable. A wife is considered as a prime candidate for migration if the family wants to have a child born in the United States to secure its future legal footing.

Once this early core group, the "seed population," begins to get established -- when it accumulates enough savings for a down payment on a takeout restaurant in the Bronx, for instance -- other family members are brought over one by one: wives and sisters to help out as cashiers, grandparents to look after the children, and so on. The children will be put to work as soon as they are old enough to act as translators and delivery boys or girls -- forming the second generation of the family's "corporate venture."

The migration engine does not stop there. The wives do not abandon their original families -- they and their in-laws' family will assist their siblings and parents by linking them into the migration chain. The siblings can then start a new cycle of family migration, thus extending the network to people with different surnames and eventually encompassing an entire community of neighbors and fellow villagers. The chain can eventually include not just the population of a whole village but an entire dialect group.

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 Fuzhounese as a chance to extend their economic power, by bringing in a relative either 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 move upward only if they accumulate some capital, and for that Fuzhounese need cheap and dependable labor. Their kin back home are the ideal candidates.

A Deadly Embrace

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.

Established by seamen who had jumped ship in the early 1970s, a "seed population" in New York has helped the Fuzhounese to fulfill the first condition. This seed population was expanded with the 1986 amnesty program and President Bush's 1989 executive order, which provided legal status for Chinese already in this country. The resulting relatively large legal resident community of Fuzhounese had accumulated enough savings to pay smugglers for shipping their relatives over. The Fuzhounese fulfill the second condition of the smuggling networks by the virtue of their proven dedication to their family migration projects, for which they are willing to keep quiet and even tolerate abuse by snakeheads.

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. If there is a debt-payment dispute, the family in China as a rule sides with the smugglers, typically convinced that its own members in the United States are at fault. The snakeheads have devised their own propaganda and misinformation campaign in order to attract as many innocent people as possible onto the smuggling journey. 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 more years, buy a business. Those unable to do so are considered mei-zushi, useless and lacking in ambition. Even those family members not expecting to immigrate to the United States 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 they 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. The smugglers are therefore using the strong kinship ties of the Fuzhounese to keep their clients in line.

Reaching the Limit

There are limits, however, to how far the Fuzhounese's resources could be exploited. The smuggling operations are increasingly limited by the U.S. Fuzhounese immigrant community's finances. 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. Paul Smith of Pacific Forum estimates that between 1991 and 1994, there were 25,000 Fuzhounese illegals entering the United States yearly (Smith, 1994:60-77). That means that at least 100,000 illegal Fuzhounese, not counting the thousands who came before and after that period, paid $30,000 each-a grand total of $3 billion. No new immigrant community can withstand this amount of debt.

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 were the inevitable consequences. In the meantime, knowing the importance of family structure to the Fuzhounese, the snakeheads used every means possible to exploit that weakness. They kidnapped and tortured those illegals with relatives to ensure speedy payment. They enlisted the support of debtors' families in China to exact maximum pressure on them (World Journal, March 1995: B2). Most of all, they forced the illegals themselves to collect funds from their relatives.

These wayward indebted illegals are also recruited to be the enforcers. At times they simply go off on their own to prey on others as a way of paying off their own debts. They have been known to seize clients who have already paid and torture them in safe houses to force their relatives to pay again. 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. The atmosphere of fear and insecurity intensifies.

Finally, the snakeheads, in order to maintain the volume of their business, developed a modified form of "kinship sponsoring system." Rich Fuzhounese restaurant and garment factory owners and gambling and prostitution kingpins, who are legal and came to this country earlier, stepped in to sponsor new groups of "distant relatives." The snakeheads, knowing the reputation and reliability of the sponsors, smuggled the new recruits at a discount, some even entirely on credit. These new recruits have to work for the sponsors as unpaid labor for several years while the enforcers ensure their complacency through control over their relatives in China. They are, therefore, trapped in a state of virtual indentured servitude.

Modern-Day Coolies

Employers, of course, prefer Fuzhounese because they are cheaper and because they must accept almost any conditions in order to pay off their debts to the snakeheads. In fact, many employment agencies specialize in illegals. For instance, it is a well-known fact among short-term labor employers' circles that agencies around East Broadway in New York's Chinatown specialize in undocumented Fuzhounese workers. The posted employer requests come from all over the East Coast, including New Jersey, Connecticut, and Maine, even from Ohio and North Carolina.

In the past ten years, undocumented Fuzhounese have penetrated deeply into the garment, construction, and restaurant trades in New York. Many of their employers are not Chinese. Non-Chinese-owned small electronics factories in New Jersey, construction companies specializing in loft renovation in Soho, and Long Island farms alike use Chinese employment agencies to find Chinese labor contractors who will take care of selection, transportation, payment, and management of their workers. In fact, if one looks into the kitchens of most mid-priced continental or American restaurants in Manhattan, one is likely to find a number of Fuzhounese working there. When a construction company can hire a skilled carpenter for fifty dollars a day and an unskilled one for even less, without ever even having to know the workers' pay scale, why should it matter what kind of conditions the workers are laboring under?

With the flood of desperate, undocumented aliens willing to work, Chinese employers are in a position to depress the labor conditions to the limits for all other workers as well. Wages in the Chinatown garment industry, already low by American standards before the arrival of the Fuzhounese, have declined even further. Home work, thought to have disappeared in America fifty years ago, is a common phenomenon in Chinatown, as is child labor, which has pushed down the already low wage scale in the garment industry.

Testifying in 1995 at a Senate hearing for antisweatshop legislation, Mrs. Tang, a schoolteacher in Guangdong Province who had immigrated ten years ago to Brooklyn, recalled that in the early eighties she worked eight hours a day and earned forty to fifty dollars a day. Today, with competition from the Fuzhounese, she slaves twelve hours a day to make a paltry thirty dollars (World Journal, September 26, 1996: B4). For her, it is almost as if she has to work twice as long to make the same amount of money.

Those who have worked in the industry for some time and are physically no longer able to keep up the pace are assigned to lesser jobs, such as cutting threads, and make even less. Immigrants from Fuzhou, who are usually younger, choose to work at nonunion shops in order to get more take-home pay, still averaging about forty dollars a day.

Competition from the illegals is forcing documented Chinese workers to settle for less if they want to maintain steady employment. Employers lay off workers as soon as their work orders are completed. In the slower months, from November to the end of the year, seamstresses make less than two hundred dollars a month. For immigrants paying off enormous debts, this sum is absurdly, desperately low. They line up outside the factory long before the doors open to be the first ones to begin work. At night, they refuse to quit even after ten, just to be able to get a few more pieces done for a few more dollars. Some of the seamstresses on sewing machines are known not to drink anything during the day lest they interrupt their work, calculated on piece rate, by going to the bathroom. One Cantonese garment lady has testified to a congressional committee that Fuzhounese illegals work until two in the morning, sleep in the factory, and start again right after sunrise. Sometimes, if they are not able to complete a given order, they ask their children to come in to help (Baoqing, 1996; B1) Now even Fuzhounese men work on the sewing machines, competing with the traditionally all-woman labor force.

Not surprisingly, the illegals have the best chance of getting and keeping a job. The employers like them because they are young, committed, and willing to work long hours and also for their docility and uncomplaining nature. Some employers are interested only 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. In every Chinatown discussion about workplace conditions, the Fuzhounese, the wu-sun-fun (people with no status), are the target of scorn.

The most egregious practice at both unionized and nonunion Chinese garment factories in New York is withholding workers' legitimate wages. This problem has reached epidemic proportions. Previously, the normal withholding period was three weeks; now anything under five weeks is considered good. The length of wage withholding has become the single criterion used by garment women in choosing a factory. Of course, there is never a guarantee; after the employment starts, the employer can claim cash flow problems or manufacturers' nonpayment to postpone his own wage payments. After a few weeks of unpaid wages, the workers are faced with the difficult decision of whether to hope against hope and work for another week or quit and cut their losses (Kwong, 1997: 104).

Employers are violating the most basic right of a worker -- to be paid after the work is done. If the workers ask for their back pay, they are given excuses. If they push further, they are blacklisted (never to be hired by any other contractor in the Chinese community), threatened with informing their illegal status to the INS, or even threatened with gang violence. In the meantime, the employers let their accountants figure out how much back pay and taxes they owe, to help them decide when to close the shop down, change to a new corporate entity, and reopen at a new location.

Taking legal action against employers almost never succeeds. In the first place, the employers do not believe that illegals would dare to file complaints against them, because of their illegal status. Even then there are hundreds of complaints against Chinese employers for back wages filed with the New York State Labor Department, but so far there have been only two convictions. The first was brought in 1993, but the workers have yet to collect any back payment. More recently, in September 1996, workers won back wages totaling fifty-nine thousand dollars -- for work done between August 1992 and November 1993. More typically, employers simply take advantage of legal loopholes and opt for bankruptcy proceedings whenever they face pressure for back wages. Workers arrive one morning to find the factory gates closed without a forwarding address or any other information. The same owners soon reopen nearby under a new corporate title with an altered partnership, refusing legal responsibility for the defunct factory.

The illegal Chinese workers were also used for union busting. In 1994, the owners of the Silver Palace Restaurant -- one of Chinatown's largest restaurants, which was unionized in 1980 -- locked out all their union workers, claiming that their wages were too high. The locked-out union workers picketed the restaurant for more than seven months. "If the owners win this one," the leader of the picketing workers stressed, "employers all over Chinatown could impose any kind of conditions they want on the working people, no matter whether they are legal or undocumented. We are then nothing but slaves" (interview with Kwong Hui, leader of the picketing workers). The issue is no longer just the treatment of illegals. In Chinatown, where employers use illegals to depress wages for all legal workers, they have transformed the problem into a class struggle between labor and management.

Ineffective Enforcement of Labor Law

To blame all the problems that Chinatown workers face on Chinese employers, however, is too easy. This is not just a Chinese internal problem, as some people would like one to believe. Chinese contractors are behaving this way because they know they can get away with it, because they know that no American institution will intervene to impose standard rules and regulations to protect the weak and the vulnerable in the Chinese community.

The performance of the Labor Department can be described at best as ineffective, passive, and slow. According to its own reports, 90 percent of the factories in Chinatown are sweatshops. Yet it rarely initiates action.

If it is criticized, its typical first response is to claim that it is understaffed; it then blames the workers for not coming forward. When they do come forward, the Labor Department takes months to investigate the case, while the workers are exposed to retribution by the bosses: to come forward means risking being fired or even physically harmed. And in the end, after a long wait, nothing usually comes of it: the Labor Department claims that the owner's corporate entity has changed and that the defendant cannot be found. Even when an errant owner is convicted, the punishment is minimal -- at the worst, the labor violations are judged a misdemeanor. The workers are usually forced to settle, and they generally get only a small portion of the wages owed. But so few cases have been prosecuted so far that no employer in Chinatown needs to worry.

The labor union -- most of the Chinese workers in Lower Manhattan are members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE)-- is not performing much better. It can also be best described as ineffective, passive, and slow. What's worse, the union's representatives tend to have a better relationship with the owners than the workers, and they regularly side with them (Kwong and Lum, 1988: 899).

The workers, thus, have nowhere to turn. They are silenced and trapped in their own ethnic environment, which is completely controlled, by the employers. Employers are using every means available to squeeze extra profits, including laying off workers to collect unemployment compensation while still asking them to work for less.

The long hours and low wages have taken a toll on the physical condition of many Chinatown workers. After several years of working like machines chasing after the piece rate, for twelve hours a day and seven days a week, workers begin to develop physical ailments. Seamstresses generally complain of sore arms, back and shoulder pains, and swollen feet. Bronchial asthma is also common; it is caused by prolonged exposure to the chemicals used in treating fabrics. Working more than eighty hours a week has also led to all sorts of relatively uncommon problems -- pinched nerves, headaches, dizzy spells, heart palpitations, missed menstrual cycles, and insomnia -- overwork symptoms not well known in this country since the turn of the century. Once sick, the workers are slowed down and are not able to earn enough to be eligible for medical insurance. This is the time when they find out that their employers have not been paying dues for their Workmen's Compensation and Social Security benefits.

For illegals, their priority is to pay off debts, and they simply cannot get sick. Mr. Lan, who left his wife and children behind in Fuzhou, came here illegally five years ago and worked hard to pay off his huge smuggling debt. Under heavy pressure and emotional stress, his health declined. His wife, realizing his predicament, came illegally to help him out. But this doubled his debt, and his health deteriorated to the point that he could no longer work. Thus the whole family started to depend solely on his wife's income as a seamstress -- just to survive. The debts remained. One day, when his wife was out working, he hung himself (World Journal, March 1, 1996: B1).

American Business Climate

The U.S. government's ineffectiveness should be seen in the context of America's demand for cheap labor. For some time now the American economy has been emphasizing growth through deregulation and increased labor productivity. The most effective way to achieve this is by employing nonunionized labor. Immigrant labor is even better, not only because it is not organized but also because it is less protected. Following this logic, undocumented labor is the best: entirely unregulated and thus the most productive. If we push this logic one more step, then the most productive labor would be the "unfree" undocumented immigrant labor, such as the indebted Fuzhounese workers. Therefore, their unchecked entry into this country in such large numbers is in the spirit of the current American economic philosophy.

American corporations have responded to global competition through a strategy of restructuring that calls for production decentralization. Decentralization under a subcontracting system, the corporations can still control prices and product quality through competition among the many small suppliers. The competition among the small suppliers is so intense that they have to accept a low rate of profitability, which forces them to abandon the capital investment needed to maintain modernized production as well as the desire to train and upgrade their workforce (Luria, 1996: 11-16). While they bear the brunt of the ups and downs of the market fluctuation, the small suppliers have the additional responsibility of managing the workforce, trying to minimize labor costs by adopting tactics of union busting, and freezing or cutting wages. Typically they will hire less educated and less skilled workers -- often immigrant labor. Illegal immigrants are best of all, since they are not organized or legally protected.

In short, to win competitively, small firms employ what is called a "low road" strategy. The losers are the employers who do precisely what common sense says they should do: invest, train, innovate, and hire well-educated legal workers. The recent efflorescence of sweatshops in the apparel industry in New York and Los Angeles, for instance, should not be a surprise.

On the other end, the ineffectiveness of labor law enforcement has political support. Some of the most important elected officials in New York, for instance, are susceptible to political influence from employers. They lack concern for labor issues and have no qualms about taking contributions from sweatshop operators.

Governor George Pataki attended a banquet at Jing Fong Restaurant in New York's Chinatown in November 1995 to award the "Outstanding Asian American Award" to Cheng Chung-ko, the owner/manager of the restaurant. Yet in 1997, the New York State Attorney General's Office filed suit against Cheng's restaurant, charging it with cheating fifty-eight workers of more than $1.5 million in tips and wages. Attorney General Dennis Vacco asserted that fifty-eight Jing Fong employees who worked sixty or more hours weekly were paid just $65 to $100 a week. They should have earned more than $300 with overtime (Greenhouse, 1997: AS).

Universal Enforcement of Labor Standards

As long as there is no effective labor enforcement, employers will have the incentives to hire illegals, and the flood of illegal immigration will continue. Harsh immigration restrictions will not stop this flow because they do not address the heart of the problem: the ever healthy demand of American business for vulnerable, unprotected labor. Even with all the public attention generated by the Golden Venture fiasco, Chinese illegal migration has continued. It will continue because the sensational headlines, punitive legislation, and political demagoguery all work together to reinforce the essential appeal of illegal Chinese laborers to the American businesses that employ them: illegal aliens continue to be cheaper, more pliable, and more dependent on their employers than legitimate labor. More than any other single fact, this explains how human smuggling has grown in the last half of the last decade of the twentieth century into an industry boasting $4 billion in annual profits.

If our objective is to prevent employers from hiring and exploiting illegal workers so American working conditions will not deteriorate, we need a different logic and a different approach. This is essentially a labor and not an immigration issue.

The only way to immunize American workers from the damage caused by the presence of illegal alien laborers is by across-the-board enforcement of all U.S. labor laws, affecting all employers in the United States -- whether foreign or U.S. citizens, employing foreign documented, undocumented, or domestic labor. Strict enforcement means adherence to American labor standards, particularly in regards to the minimum wage, the forty-hour workweek, and OSHA health and safety regulations.

Strict enforcement also means uncompromising prosecution of reported violations without regard to whether the information was provided by an American-born worker, a legal, or an illegal immigrant. Only then will all the victims speak out and the labor abuses stop. At the same time, the extension of American labor standards to all workers will eliminate employers' incentive to recruit and exploit illegals and also put a brake on the barbaric human smuggling trade.

REFERENCES

Baoqing, Lin. 1996. World Journal, August 26, B1.

Chan, Ying. 1993. Daily News, September 10.

Chin, Ko-lin. 1996. "Safe House or Hell House?: The Experiences of Newly Arrived Undocumented Chinese." Paper presented at the Conference on Asia Migrant Trafficking: The New Threat to America's Immigration Tradition, Honolulu, July 25-a7, sponsored by the Pacific Forum CSIS.

Greenhouse, Steve. 1997. "Big Chinatown Restaurant Sued on Wages and Tips." New York Times, January 24, A5.

Hood, Marlowe. 1994. "The Taiwan Connection." Los Angeles Times, October 9,1.

Kaihla, P. 1996. "The People's Smugglers." Maclean's, April 29.

Kwong, Peter. 1997. Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor. New York: New Press.

Kwong, Peter, and Jo Ann Lum. 1988. "How the other Half Lives Now." Nation, June 18, 899

Luria, Daniel. 1996. "Why Markets Tolerate Mediocre Manufacturing." Challenge 11-16 (July/August): 11-16.

Nin-lung, Liu. 1996. Chinese Snakepeople [Choong Kuo Ren Tsai Tsao]. Hong Kong: Nineties Monthly/Going Fine.

Russell, Sharon Stanton. 1995. "Migration Patterns of U.S. Foreign Policy Interest." In Threatened People, Threatened Borders: World Migration and U.S.

Policy, edited by M. Teitelbaum and M. Weiner, 39-87. New York: Norton. Smith, Paul. 1994. "The Strategic Implications of Chinese Emigration." Survival 36(2): 60-77.

-- 1996. "Illegal Chinese Immigrants Everywhere, and No Letup in Sight." International Herald Tribune, June 28, 1.

"The Worsening Fuzhouese Gang Violence." 1995. World Journal, B2.