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Monday July 3
8:22 AM ET
U.S. Says Money Drives Human Trafficking From ChinaBy Paul Eckert BEIJING (Reuters) - China has helped curb the flow of ships carrying illegal Chinese immigrants, but human traffickers are changing routes and methods in pursuit of growing profits, the top U.S. immigration official said on Monday. ``The trafficking in those large ships that were very dangerous has pretty much been thwarted'' -- in part due to help from China in repatriating passengers, said Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner Doris Meissner. ``But what we know about smuggling is that the smuggling adjusts and shifts very quickly,'' she told reporters in Beijing.
Meissner and a dozen other INS officials were due to travel to coastal Fujian province, source of the 58 dead and where illegal emigration was a deep-seated tradition. The convoluted route the ill-fated Fujianese took -- through the former Soviet states and Eastern Europe -- underscored the adaptability and sophistication of smugglers. Fighting human traffickers ``is more difficult because the groups are smaller and the routes are more widespread,'' she said. She estimated that while the United States had repatriated 1,000 Chinese who had come illegally by boat in the past year, it had sent back 2,700 who had come by air in the year to date and that number was expected to reach 4,000 by the end of this year. The INS has estimated that 30,000 Chinese illegal aliens sneak into the United States each year. Chinese Prices Highest In World Driving the traffic were prices for smuggling Chinese that were the highest among the world's migrants, Meissner said. Chinese smuggling was in a category of its own in terms of ''the amounts of money and the level of organization and the level of criminality and extortion and abuse that is involved,'' she said. She said the price for Chinese passage to the United States had risen to about $50,000 person from $30,000 a few years ago. Others have said Chinese pay up to $60,000 each to become stowaways bound for North America, Europe or Australia, where many end up enslaved in sweatshops or brothels paying off the smugglers, known as ``snakeheads,'' who organize their passage. Many analysts have pointed to official collusion with the snakeheads, especially in Fujian, which is in the midst of investigating China's biggest ever corruption case -- a goods smuggling ring touching high provincial and national officials. Meissner said the scale of the human trafficking network raised serious questions about official connivance. ``The larger the operators, the more likely it is that they have to be getting some help from officials along the way,'' she said. ``That of course always raises the issue of corruption.'' ``We've gotten good cooperation case-by-case, but it is very much case-by-case,'' she said of China's anti-snakehead fight. Fujian Tackles Embarrassment Official Chinese figures show 10,000 illegal emigrants were caught last year, 80 percent from Fujian. There are no reliable estimates of the number who make it safely to the West. Jean Christiansen, Bangkok-based INS regional director for Asia, said the agency's office in the southern city of Guangzhou was getting increasingly better help from Fujian authorities. ``Right now they do have boats patrolling the coasts and they are being very effective -- we haven't seen a boat this year,'' she said. ``They are embarrassed by this. They don't want to see it happen and they're working to stop it,'' Christiansen said.
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