The Price of Freedom

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.