The People Smugglers

BY WILLIAM BAUER

ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1998, Vancouver Police officers were alerted to a youngster involved with drug dealers operating in the city's crime-ridden downtown eastside. As two plainclothesmen cruised a street-corner drug bazaar, they saw a 14-year-old Honduran boy acting as a "mule" for nearby dealers.

       When the boy spotted detectives Rob McKeddie and Rich Akin approaching, he hurriedly swallowed his stash of crack cocaine. Later, ten "rocks" were pumped from his stomach in hospital.

       The boy was recruited in Honduras by criminals who tempt villagers with promises of welfare and easy money. The gangsters pay the children's transportation costs and smuggle them across the Canadian border, often posing as their parents. To repay their transit debts, the youngsters must deal drugs. Since the criminals and their young victims have all claimed refugee status, they cannot be deported.

AROUND the globe, a vicious new trade in illegal cargo -- human beings -- has burgeoned over the past decade. These flesh cartels are run by the same crime syndicates who traffic drugs and arms -- including Colombian drug lords, Chinese triads, Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers and the Russian Mafia. But smuggling people has become more profitable even than the heroin trade, with much lighter penalties.

       According to a study by Jonas Widgren, a former U.N. official who heads the Vienna-based International Centre for Migration Policy Development, people smugglers worldwide earn as much as $10 billion a year, more than twice the annual earnings of the Medellín cocaine cartel at its peak. The people-smugglers' prey are often desperate migrants from impoverished and war-torn countries. Many, though, are financially well off, trying to evade normal immigation screening procedures. Some are war criminals or terrorists seeking a safe haven. To get here, they pay smugglers up to $70,000.

       En route, many die of cold, drowning, suffocation or starvation while squeezed into sealed shipping containers and trucks. Some endure months of physical abuse amid the squalor of rusty freighters and overloaded fishing boats. On arrival they may find themselves victims of kidnapping, extortion and rape, or forced into prostitution rings and sweatshops as disposable labour.

       Roughly 60 percent of the 23,800 refugee claimants who showed up in Canada in 1998 had either fake identity documents or none at all -- a sure sign that they used smugglers to get here.

       According to a 1998 study on the impact of organized crime prepared for the Solicitor-General of Canada, the federal and provincial governments spend up to $400 million a year processing and caring for bogus refugee claimants: Each declared refugee costs us $56,000. This money could be used far more effectively to alleviate the suffering of genuine refugees abroad.

       People-smuggling syndicates operate in countries such as Iran, India, China, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Nigeria and Brazil. Smugglers often take circuitous routes to bring their human cargo from Third World countries, depending on bilateral visa treaties and gaps in airport and border security.

       Canada is a favourite destination because we have the highest acceptance rate of refugees in the world -- up to 70 percent of those who apply, compared to 17 percent for the United States and seven percent in Germany. Canada also has one of the lowest deportation rates for rejected claimants. Says Jonas Widgren: "The Canadian asylum system has been much too liberal."

       An illegal immigrant, once he has claimed to be a refugee, cannot be arrested even if he enters Canada unlawfully -- without identification papers, say, or with the help of smugglers. In addition, once the claim is made, he automatically receives welfare, free medical care and legal aid until his case is resolved, a process that can take from two to ten years.

SINCE the mid-1980s, people smuggling has increased tenfold in Canada, and the situation has continued to worsen. The RCMP warn that nearly all criminal groups in Canada are now engaged in smuggling illegal aliens.

       "The going rate is what the market will bear," says Cpl. Fred Bowen, an RCMP investigator with the Passport and Immigration Section in Toronto. "From the Punjab in northern India, you can reach Canada for $12,000 to $15,000. Sri Lankans are generally charged $30,000 and Chinese now pay as much as $70,000."

       While the majority of Chinese "refugees" entering Canada use this country as a back door into the United States, there is an equally thriving conduit of illegals passing through the United States destined for Canada.

       In October 1997, a Punjabi family visited a Sikh Temple in New York City. They knew, as do most new refugees from northern India, that they would be able to contact a smuggler through the temple to take them to their promised land Canada.

       In their rural Indian village, the father, his wife and their two-year-old son had eked out a miserable existence. The father had been repeatedly beaten by the local police when he refused to hand over his meagre crop to the local authorities in bribes. At their wits' end, they sold their land and, with all their savings, contacted a smuggler who would take them as far as New York. Another $3,500 to another smuggler would get them across the Canadian border.

       First, they were taken by bus to Syracuse, N.Y., where they were crowded with other illegal immigrants into a single hotel room. The family huddled with others, warming tins of food over small stoves.

       After several days, the Punjabis were taken by car to the Akwesasne Mohawk reserve, which straddles the U.S.-Canadian and the Quebec-Ontario borders. They were then picked up at night and taken by boat across the St. Lawrence River near Cornwall, Ont. Acting on a tip,the local police apprehended the family and took them to the station. "They were cowering in a corner with fear," says RCMP Const. Pat McAfee. "The little boy was coughing and obviously very sick, and the woman was sobbing.

       "About 80 percent of the refugees we pick up have stories about mistreatment by authorities at home," McAfee continues. "They're as afraid of us as they are of the authorities in their own countries."

       Most refugees arrive in North America by plane, but others trickle across the international boundary by every means from walking to inflatable rafts. In July 1998, 27 Costa Ricans were found squeezed into a van driving along a Vermont road.

       "These people will try to walk across the narrow railway bridge 70 metres above the Niagara River in the middle of winter when it's covered with ice," says one U.S. border-patrol agent. "They've even been picked up trying to swim the St. Lawrence clinging to a piece of wood," McAfee adds. Usually they carry little luggage and have no winter clothing.

THE GROWING tide of people-smuggling schemes is overwhelming law enforcement in every developed country. In Toronto alone, the RCMP suspect that there are at least 50 major traffickers, each importing at least 100 clients annually.

       But some progress is being made. On December 10, 1998, Canadian and American authorities smashed what U.S. Attorney-General Janet Reno called "the largest global alien smuggling ring operating in the two countries." Charging $47,000 a head, in two years the smugglers made $170 million transporting an estimated 3,600 Chinese through the Akwesasne reserve into the United States. The arrest netted 34 smugglers, some of them associated with the notorious Chinese triad, the Big Circle Boys.

       A phrase akin to "open sesame" allows virtually anyone to enter our country and makes us a natural target for people smugglers. The key to Canada is as simple as walking up to an Immigration Canada official and saying: "I declare refugee status." Clients of people smugglers are coached to claim their home was destroyed and that they were beaten.

       The troubles of the migrants are not necessarily over when they arrive in their target country. In order to pay off their debts to their smugglers, they are often forced to work illegally at jobs that are dangerous. They are beaten if they miss their payments and may, to prolong their enslavement, be robbed repeatedly by the smuggler's henchmen just before they do make a payment.

       Women are particularly vulnerable. A raid on bawdy houses and massage parlours in Toronto on September 10, 1997, revealed that women were being recruited on a wholesale basis in Malaysia and Thailand, and brought to Canada and the United States to work as prostitutes. Although most had undertaken the journey to raise money for family and medical costs back home, they were forced or sold into prostitution on arrival, held virtual prisoners until they paid off their $40,000 debts. Then, just when they thought they'd earned their freedom, the smugglers would alert authorities and the women would be captured and deported -- just as the smugglers brought in a fresh batch of enslaved women.

THE PROBLEM of illegal immigration is a serious one without easy solutions. How do you put a stop to the dreams of those who toil in fields or who struggle to feed their children? As long as the impoverished in the world thirst for a "Gold Mountain" somewhere on the globe, they will move towards that dream of a better life, regardless of the human cost.

       But large-scale evasion of normal immigration procedures by international crime syndicates and by fraudulent refugee claimants cannot be tolerated. Genuine refugees and legitimate immigrants pay a price in delay and even refusal. Canadian law is looked upon with contempt by those who so easily achieve Canadian citizenship by fraud and deceit.

       The flood of illegal immigration also poses a major threat to Canadian security. It is almost impossible to screen fraudulent refugee claimants for past criminal activities, and according to a recent Immigration Department report, Canada is "becoming a haven for modern war criminals as a growing number of suspects from Africa, Europe and Latin America turn up to claim refugee status."

       Says Ward Elcock, head of Canadian Security and Intelligence Services: "With perhaps the singular exception of the United States, there are more international terrorist groups active here than in any other country in the world." Most of them use the asylum process to get into Canada and stay here.

       Ways must be found to discourage the traffickers and their clients. People arriving on our doorstep without documents should be refused entry unless they identify the traffickers who escorted them. The smugglers should be tracked down and given prison sentences comparable to those given drug traffickers, and their ill-gotten gains should be confiscated.

       The government must find the will to expedite and carry out the deportation of failed claimants rather than letting them live a taxpayer-sponsored lifestyle for years on end.

       Finally, it is now far too easy for fraudulent claimants and their lawyers to persuade the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) to grant refugee status. To counter this, political appointees to the IRB should be replaced by highly trained, judicially independent civil servants familiar with the history of the applicant's country of origin.

       Until these things are done, the gangs will continue to prosper -- and their often innocent victims will go on suffering and dying.

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