Working Immigrants

A March 2006 Brookings Institution study reports that between 2000 and 2004, “Hispanic and Asian populations are spreading out from their traditional metropolitan centers, while the shift of blacks toward the South is accelerating.”
It goes on to report that

Of the nation’s 361 metropolitan areas, 111 registered declines in white population from 2000 to 2004, with the largest absolute losses occurring in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Declines were greatest in coastal metropolitan areas and economically stagnant parts of the country. More so than for minority groups, white population growth has dispersed towards smaller-sized areas.

Minorities contributed the majority of population gains in the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas and central metropolitan counties from 2000 to 2004. Minority groups remain the demographic lifeblood of inner counties in older metropolitan areas, but they are increasingly fueling growth in fast-growing outer suburban and “exurban” counties as well.

Hispanic, Asian, and black populations continue to migrate to, and expand their presence in, new destinations. They are increasingly living in suburbs, in rapidly growing job centers in the South and West, and in more affordable areas adjacent to higher-priced coastal metro areas. The wider dispersal of minority populations signifies the broadening relevance of policies aimed at more diverse, including immigrant, communities.

The study: Diversity Spreads Out: Metropolitan Shifts in Hispanic, Asian, and Black Populations Since 2000, by William H. Frey, March 2006
Further findings:

Continue reading Non-white populations continue to penetrate more areas of the country

The handing down of a 35 year sentence on 3/16 in New York City brought a kind of closure to one of the most lurid worker smuggler schemes in recent American history: Chinese coming into the U.S. by boat, plane, or via Mexico, under the control of professional smugglers, or “snakeheads,” and Cheng Chui Ping – “Sister Ping” — in particular.
As reported by the New York Times, “The Chinatown businesswoman who calls herself Sister Ping was sentenced yesterday to 35 years in prison for running one of New York City’s most lucrative immigrant smuggling rings and for financing the infamous voyage of the Golden Venture, the rusting freighter that ran aground off Queens in June 1993 with nearly 300 starving immigrants in its fetid hold. Ten of the immigrants died after they leaped into chilly waves off the Rockaways in a final effort to reach American soil.”
According to an article, “A hard road ahead: how the snakeheads rule”,

Driving the flow of illegal Chinese immigrants into the U.S. is the hope of fabulous economic gain. An undocumented Chinese can earn about $1,500 a month working at a restaurant in America. An immigrant who sends half that money home to China can catapult his or her family into the upper class in a country where the average income, according to several international reports, is between $250 and $300 a year. An INS intelligence report estimates that in 1999, between 12,000 and 24,000 illegal Chinese entered the United States, although academics and other experts say the number is much higher. Of these undocumented immigrants, more than 80 percent come from the Fujian province in southeastern China.

Alien smuggling from China began in the 1970s, according to the FBI’s Rose. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that masses of Fujianese began entering the country illegally. Throughout the 1980s, the Cantonese population in New York City’s Chinese communities ballooned, expanding from New York City’s Chinatown into Brooklyn and Queens. In the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, the U.S. government began to relax its immigration policies. One policy implemented during this time came as a result of the Chinese government’s 1989 crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square; President George Bush’s administration allowed all Chinese students in the United States at the time to become legal permanent residents. Encouraged, the Chinese began coming to the United States in greater numbers, increasing the influx of Chinese immigration from a trickle to a flow.

Returning to the New York Times article, “Ms. Cheng, 57, was convicted on June 23 after a monthlong trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan on three counts of immigrant smuggling, money-laundering and trafficking in kidnapping proceeds….. The tough sentence marked the end of a 12-year effort to catch and prosecute Ms. Cheng….. Martin D. Ficke, the special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for New York, said Ms. Cheng’s was the biggest immigrant smuggling operation ever investigated in New York. He said the operation had been shut down.
“An assistant United States attorney, Leslie C. Brown, said at the beginning of the hearing that ….in a two-decade smuggling career, the prosecutor said, Ms. Cheng charged exorbitant rates for a sea trip in which passengers were given little food and sometimes only two sips of water a day. Once they arrived in the United States she hired gang members to ensure that they paid their debts to her, Ms. Brown said.”
Ko-lin Chin wrote “The Social Organization of Chinese Human Smuggling”
Excerpts from “Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives” (published by John Hopkins in 2001)

Continue reading Smuggling of Chinese workers into the United States