The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (48 page)

What has not changed, and should, is the essentially arbitrary nature of the determination of whether this country will grant asylum to an individual who is seeking it or send him back to an uncertain fate. Even taking for granted that the asylum process is bedeviled by fraud, one lesson of the
Golden Venture
incident is that each individual asylum case should be scrutinized with the utmost care, that decisions of such consequence should not be rushed, and that to rush a determination or to paint an entire class of claimants with the same broad brush could result—and often does result—in sending individuals home to persecution.

Through a series of “backlog elimination plans,” immigration authorities have made some progress on the long delays in processing claims of asylum. But sometimes efficiency is achieved only at the expense of fairness. Recent studies indicate that the asylum process is as arbitrary and unpredictable as ever, and without some effort to oblige asylum officers and immigration judges to harmonize the bases upon which they will grant asylum, it appears that the fate of individuals seeking refuge in this country will continue to be determined not by any coherent policy or sense of justice but ultimately by the luck of the draw.

Moreover, in the years since Sean Chen and his fellow passengers were first bused to York County Prison, immigration detention has gone from the exception to the norm. The sweeping new immigration law that passed in 1996 authorized the “expedited removal” of people who arrive in the United States without proper documents. Genuine asylum-seekers are not supposed to be removed, but those who try to enter the country without documents are subject to mandatory detention while their claims are pending. Like the
Golden Venture
passengers, they are farmed out to various facilities around the country, and there is no limit, in either federal law or agency regulation, on the amount of time an asylum-seeker may be detained. As a result there has been an enormous uptick in immigration detentions. On any given
day, some 33,000 people, including children, are jailed on immigration grounds. In 2007 the government held over 300,000 people in total while deciding whether or not to deport them. Immigration detention is now the fastest-growing form of incarceration in the United States.

The immigrants are housed in a network of detention facilities, some of which are owned by private prison companies, and in hundreds of local and county jails. These sites are overcrowded and underregulated. It is possible for immigrants who have committed no crime apart from the civil infraction of being in this country without proper documentation simply to disappear into this system. Health care is substandard, when it exists at all. In 1999 a Chinese woman who had come to America seeking asylum gave birth in a jail cell in Illinois; the guards hadn’t noticed she was pregnant. According to a study by the
Washington Post
, in a recent five-year period, eighty-three detainees died in immigration custody. The actions or inactions of medical staff were responsible in a significant number of those cases. But the leading cause of death among those held in immigration detention is suicide.

It is an ironic reflection of American attitudes on immigration that this penal system costs taxpayers an estimated $1.2 billion a year to maintain. That sum is so colossal that if even a fraction of it were redirected to hiring and training asylum officers, immigration judges, and other administrative staff to help process the backlog of immigration cases, and to do so in such a way that people’s claims are actually accorded the serious consideration they deserve, it could cut down on the duration of these indefinite prison sentences and the need to jail immigrants in the first place.

A
fter the last of the
Golden Venture
passengers departed from York County Prison in 1997, the facility continued to house immigration detainees. In 1999 the prison underwent an expansion, and that year it became the single largest immigration detention facility in the United States. York might seem, in that respect, to be an expression of America
at its most xenophobic and intolerant. But whatever it was that the passengers from the
Golden Venture
had managed to awaken in the people of York somehow persisted long after most of the Chinese men had moved away. The motley coalition that had made up the People of the Golden Vision remains active to this day, arranging legal help and small comforts for the detainees held at the prison and lobbying in Washington for more humane treatment of refugees. The group raised funds to purchase an old property in downtown York, which became International Friendship House, a shelter and halfway house for refugees and other migrants released from immigration detention. They established the Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center, which offers free legal advice to asylum-seekers, and it comes to the aid not just of the Fujianese but of Bosnians and Iranians, Iraqis, Liberians, and Sudanese. To this day, Bev Church, Craig Trebilcock, Joan Maruskin, and other members of the group continue to work on behalf of the
Golden Venture
passengers, helping them with their efforts to start businesses and purchase property, pay their taxes, and care for their families. And each new congressional term, Bev Church reenters the private bill for consideration by Congress, on the off-chance that more than fifteen years after their arrival on the beach in Queens, the passengers might obtain green cards and become legal residents of the country they call home.

O
ne breezy afternoon in the summer of 2008, I drove from Jacksonville, Florida, to Amelia Island, a pretty, palm-fringed stretch of beach not far from the border with Georgia, where Bill Slattery the former district director of the INS in New York and the man who first decided to detain the
Golden Venture
passengers, lives today. Following the arrival of the ship in 1993, Slattery’s career continued its rapid ascent, and he was nominated to take on the number-three position at the INS. But after a short few years on the job, he was forced to retire from the agency amid a revolt by his subordinates and allegations of corruption. (No formal charges of corruption were ever brought.)

We sat at Slattery’s kitchen table and made sandwiches from cold cuts and talked about immigration for hours. Slattery remained angry about the degree to which snakeheads like Sister Ping had exploited the vulnerabilities of the United States, and to this day he is skeptical about the asylum claims of the passengers aboard the
Golden Venture
. He showed no remorse for having thrown the passengers into prison, and mocked as sentimental those who were moved by the thousands of paper sculptures the detainees made during their years behind bars. But when I asked Slattery what he thought should become of the passengers now, I was surprised by his answer. “These people now fall onto the legitimate side,” he said. “We’re not going to send them back once they’ve been here this long.” Slattery’s rationale was pragmatic, he explained. Right now, immigration officials are wasting time monitoring the paroled
Golden Venture
passengers when they could be devoting their energies to stopping new illegal immigrants from entering the country. “So I would support the private legislation,” he concluded. “Give them the okay and let them be productive members of society.”

The sun was setting by the time I said good-bye to Slattery and drove back along the beach. The waves of the Atlantic were battering the shore. I thought about Sister Ping, who, having failed in her appeal, was now determined to take her case to the Supreme Court. The court would ultimately decline to hear the case, and Sister Ping will likely spend the rest of her years in jail. Ah Kay had fared much better, and I marveled at a recent, improbable turn of events: since his release, Ah Kay had been working with his lawyers and his supporters in the government to quietly obtain something that still eluded so many of the passengers from the
Golden Venture:
his citizenship.

I thought about the hundred or so passengers from the ship who had been deported to China over the years and the fact that almost all of them had eventually come back. The resilience of these people was astonishing to me, and it occurred to me that in their sheer determination to get to this country and stay here, the passengers from the
Golden
Venture
, who were born in China and still speak only broken English, are in some ways more American than I will ever be.

I remembered something that Sean Chen had told me. He was describing the little indignities of being illegal in America, and I asked him whether, knowing what he knows now—knowing about the arduous journey, the years in prison, the perils of an undocumented existence, and, perhaps worst of all, the new prosperity in China, that country he had once risked everything to flee—he felt any regrets. Without hesitation, Sean shook his head. “If you gave me the chance,” he said, “I would do it again.”

Farther down the Florida coast, about a mile off Palm Beach, a rusted freighter lies nestled in the seabed 70 feet beneath the waves. Glittering schools of yellowtail and barracuda thread through the barnacled hatches, and brightly colored coral quilts the deck. On weekends amateur divers descend from power boats above to circle the wreck and rummage through its gaping portals, peering into the dark recesses of the ship’s cramped hold. It is as fitting a resting place as any for the
Golden Venture
.

After the ship was auctioned by the marshal’s service back in 1993, it was painted red and renamed the
United Caribbean
. For a time it was used to transport cargo up and down the coast, but the aging vessel was not even up to that task, and the new owner abandoned it on the Miami River. Eventually local authorities decided to sink the ship and turn it into an artificial reef for divers. One day in 2000 it was towed out into the Boca Raton Inlet, where holes were cut into the hull and water was pumped into the hold until the ship began a slow descent and sank to the ocean floor.

Every shipwreck tells a story. And if this particular story is in some ways an unhappy one, it is also a story about the awesome power of optimism and bravery and hope, about the many twisting paths that bring strangers to this country, and about what it means to be—and to become—American.

Acknowledgments

MY FIRST
thanks go to the hundreds of individuals who invited me into their homes and offices and took the time to talk with me over the past three years. Occasionally when I reached someone by telephone for the first time, they would exclaim, “I’ve been saying someone should write a book about this since 1993,” and in that spirit many people became not just sources but co-conspirators, raiding their files and photo albums and Rolodexes and giving me access not just to their recollections but to a rich historical paper trail. It would be impossible for me to thank here everyone I spoke with, or even just those I spoke with on more than one occasion, but I must acknowledge a handful of the most long-suffering sources: Konrad Motyka and Bill McMurry Bev Church, Joan Maruskin and Craig Trebilcock, Luke Rettler, Jim Goldman, and four other immigration officials, one of them retired, three of them still working in government, who spoke with me off the record and helped connect me with the larger network of veterans of the smuggling wars. A huge thanks also to the unfailingly patient and professional Jim Margolin of the FBI’s press office, to Megan Gaffney of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and to Mark Thorn of ICE. Thanks also to Sister Ping’s appellate lawyer, Scott Tulman, and to Ah Kay’s lawyer, Lisa Scolari.

The book would have been impossible without the cooperation of the passengers who came to America in the hold of the
Golden Venture
. Over the years I had brief interactions with numerous passengers, but
I’d especially like to thank those who spoke with me at greater length: Yang You Yi, Michael Chen, Dong Xu Zhi, Zheng Kai Qu, and most of all Sean Chen. I should also thank Sister Ping, whose note-perfect reply to my early requests for an interview was “What’s in it for me?” I appreciate her willingness to indulge me by answering my written questions. Her answers have improved the book beyond measure.

In the early stages of my research I benefited enormously from the scholarship and guidance of several individuals who had been working in this area for years before I showed up. Ko-lin Chin, Peter Kwong, Zai Liang, and the filmmaker Peter Cohn generously shared their work and their time. The academic work of David Kyle, Rey Koslowski, Paul J. Smith, Wenzhen Ye, Peter Andreas, Sheldon X. Zhang, and Dušanka Miščević was also very instructive, as was the writing on immigration law and policy of Philip Schrag, Peter Schuck, David Card, and George Borjas. James Mills’s magnificent opus,
The Underground Empire
, was especially valuable for its portrait of the Fat Man, Dickson Yao. Dating back to the 1980s, a handful of journalists have done work on human smuggling, Fujianese immigration, Sister Ping, and the Fuk Ching gang, and I want to acknowledge my debt to the extraordinary reporting of Seth Faison, Celia Dugger, and Nina Bernstein at the
New York Times;
Thomas Zambito at the
Bergen County Record;
Anthony DeStefano and Mae Cheng at
Newsday;
Ying Chan and James Dao at the
Daily News;
Pamela Burdman at the
San Francisco Chronicle;
Marlowe Hood at the
Los Angeles Times Magazine;
Brook Larmer and Melinda Liu at
Newsweek;
Peter Woolrich at the
South China Morning Post;
and Caryl Clarke at the
York Daily Record
.

Given the truly global scope of this story, I relied on the kindness of numerous sources in foreign countries. I can’t name everyone here, but a particular thanks to Matiko Bohoko, Father Michael Sparrow, Reverend Richard Diamond, and Jay New for their help on the Mombasa chapter; to the three colonels in Bangkok, Jaruvat Vasaya (“Col. Dong”), Ponsraser Ganjanarintr (“Col. Jon”), and Apichat Suriboonya (“Col. Phum”); and to the staff at the UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime, especially
Wang Qianrong, Burkhard Dammann, and Jamnan Panpatama. A hearty thanks to Senior Sergeant Major Pao Pong, now with the Bangkok Immigration Police, and to the tireless Senior Sergeant Major Thana Srinkara of the Pattaya Tourist Police, who helped me find Pao Pong and interpreted our conversation. Thanks also to the American officials who spoke with me in Bangkok but prefer not to be mentioned by name. In Hong Kong, I was especially grateful to Kingman Wong of the FBI for talking to me at such great length; to Yiu-Kong Chu at the University of Hong Kong, for demystifying the triads; and to Wayne Walsh, of the Hong Kong Department of Justice, for agreeing, on my second visit, to meet with me. Thanks also to Bill Benter, who showed me around on both trips to Hong Kong and was my guide on some memorable gustatory excursions.