Peter Chan outside the federal courthouse in Tucson where he serves as an interpreter for Chinese immigrants. (Daniel Woolfolk/NYTI)
In fiscal 2009, 332 Chinese immigrants were caught in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, up from 30 the previous year, Border Patrol figures show.
The reason is simple: dollars and cents.
As a record number of drug loads are being intercepted in Arizona, those involved in human and drug smuggling are steering some of their efforts to the more lucrative smuggling of Chinese immigrants, said David Jimarez, a U.S. Border Patrol spokesman.
Chinese immigrants commonly pay smugglers upward of $40,000 per person to lead them from their homeland into the United States. In comparison, illegal immigrants from Mexico commonly pay $1,500 to $3,000 a person, Jimarez said.
“The price far exceeds other nationalities mainly due to the elaborate nature of the trip from China to Mexico,” said Vincent Picard, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman.
Peter Chan, a Tucson businessman who works as an interpreter at the federal courthouse in Tucson where immigration hearings are held, said some immigrants had told him that they pay a deposit of $5,000 to $10,000 to Chinese smugglers before leaving China.
If the immigrants make it to America, they begin paying the smugglers the remainder of the cost. If they don’t make it into the country, Chan said, some immigrants say they will get a refund upon being sent back to China.
Smuggling non-Mexican nationals into the United States is such an intricate process that border officials suspect it is a transcontinental effort.
“We believe that there is coordination between Chinese organized crime groups and Mexican smuggling organizations,” Picard said.
Chinese smugglers have traditionally used shipping containers to pass immigrants through American ports, but that practice has subsided as enforcement on the containers has been elevated, Picard said.
He added that several new tactics in the smuggling of Chinese have emerged, some more prevalent than others.
In the most common new practice, immigrants fly from Beijing to Rome, then board a plane to Caracas, where they fly on to Mexico City and work their way up to the northern border and into the United States.
In another method, they travel to Cuba, then fly to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and move northward into the United States.
“Smuggling activity shifts with enforcement,” Picard said. “It’s like a chess game, with criminal organizations on one end and us on the other.”
Once immigrants are in Mexico, crossing into the Tucson area is the route of choice because the infrastructure is already in place.
The Tucson sector does not normally track illegal immigrant apprehensions by country because of the disparity of the figures between Mexico and other nations. Typically, other countries account for 2 percent to 5 percent of the total figures, Jimarez said.
In 2009, 11,628 of the Tucson sector’s 241,673 apprehensions were non-Mexican — nearly 5 percent, Jimarez said. Only when the sector noticed the influx did it tally the number of Chinese entering in recent years.
Arizona’s only other Border Patrol sector, in the western part of the state, had 11 Chinese immigrant arrests in the same time period.
Similar to others who enter the country illegally, the Chinese immigrants tend to be fleeing dire situations in their homeland, said Chan, the federal court interpreter.
A majority of those Chan has interacted with are from the Fujian Province, in southeastern China, and say a lack of opportunity in work and education prompts them to travel across the world to enter the United States, he said.
“They left even though they were very scared of leading a totally different life in a very different country,” Chan said.
Patsy Lee, president of the Tucson Chinese Association, said that young Chinese want to reach “gold mountain,” a phrase coined for California by those who came to work during the gold rush.
While the circumstances have changed, she said, the idea is rooted in the same ideal.
“The Chinese youth love the freedom Americans have,” Lee said. “They still see America as the land of promise.”
This article was updated to reflect numbers for the entire 2009 fiscal year.
A version of this article appeared in print on page 1 of the Tucson 2010 edition of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute.