3_books
HOME
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
SUBSCRIBE
STAFF
Contact Us:

New Labor Forum
25 West 43rd,
19th Floor
New York, NY
10036
(212) 827-0200
newlaborfourm
@qc.edu

Fall/Winter 1998 Issue

Books and the Arts

Forbidden Workers:
Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor.

by Peter Kwong.
(New York: New Press, 1997. 273 pages.)

reviewed by Mae M. Ngai

On May 30,1998 a small powerboat prophetically named Oops II, lost in a dense nighttime fog, ran aground in Bay Head, New Jersey. Unaware that the boat had been carrying illegal aliens, the authorities did detain the captain. Later, however, they picked up twenty-two young Chinese men, whom they found wet, bewildered, and obviously lost in the wealthy shore community. Each had reportedly paid $30,000 to be smuggled into the United States. The incident took place almost five years to the day after the Golden Venture, a ship carrying hundreds of illegal immigrants from China, ran into the shoals off Rockaway beach in Queens, New York. Ten Chinese who had jumped off the ship in the hope that they could swim ashore drowned.

No one knows how many illegal Chinese immigrants successfully entered the country in the five years between the Golden Venture and Oops II accidents. By Peter Kwong's estimate, the number might be over 100,000, mostly from the area surrounding Fuzhou City in Fujian Province in southeastern China. According to Forbidden Workers, Kwong's book on contemporary illegal Chinese immigration, the smuggling of Chinese is a $3-billion-a-year global operation controlled by Taiwanese organized crime. Tens of thousands of Chinese are so desperate to come to America that they risk the wretched journey and endure years of indentured servitude in Chinatown sweatshops to pay the debts they owe to the smugglers, states Kwong.

Forbidden Workers is a disturbing book. Kwong, who is director of Asian American Studies at Hunter College in New York, has written in the style of investigative journalism an exposé of human smuggling, the social costs of illegal immigration, and the problems in the enforcement of immigration policy and labor standards by government agencies. The first few chapters, in which Kwong describes the operation, business, and politics of human smuggling, are the book's strongest.

According to Kwong, the origins of late twentieth-century smuggling of Chinese lie in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Congress intended with IRCA to solve the problem of illegal immigration by offering amnesty to illegal aliens already in the United States while simultaneously enacting requirements in hiring procedures and employer sanctions to combat the hiring of undocumented workers. A modest population of illegal Fuzhounese in New York's Chinatown — mostly seamen who jumped ship during the 1970s — acquired legal residency through the amnesty provisions of IRCA. This created a seed population of legal immigrants from which the migration chain, both legal and illegal, sprang. Because the amnesty provision did not expire until 1988, Taiwanese criminal syndicates found an easy market in backdated pay stubs and tax reports among newly legalized Fuzhounese Americans, who were willing to pay almost any price to get their relatives out of China before the amnesty deadline.

Kwong illuminates dynamics inherent in immigration policy — that restrictions and loopholes both breed illegal entry. Two executive orders issued by the Bush administration in 1990 further fueled illegal Chinese immigration. The first offered legal residency to Chinese students who were in the United States before the Tienanmen incident. The second provided enhanced consideration for political asylum for those fearful of persecution because of their opposition to forced abortion or sterilization. These policies, enacted as political sops to the China human rights lobby, encouraged illegal immigration because undocumented Chinese who are apprehended by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) need only apply for asylum on grounds that they oppose China's one-child policy. Kwong estimates that the illegal Fuzhounese population in the United States may now be as high as 150,000. The fee for illegal passage into the United States has increased from $18,000 in the late 1980s to $30,000 to $40,000 today.

According to Kwong, the process works like this: First, emigrants must make a down payment of $1,000 to $5,000 to the smugglers — called snakeheads — before leaving China. They are taken by small fishing boats in Fuzhou and Wenzhou harbors to international waters, where they are picked up by large freighters or fishing boats, usually of Taiwanese origin. They then cross the Pacific to Mexico or Central America, using small fishing boats or pleasure craft to land. Taiwanese nationals operate safe houses in Bolivia and other Central American transit points, from which the illegal immigrants are escorted across the United States-Mexico border, either through Texas or southern California. They may then be taken to safe houses in Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Houston before they are flown to New York City. The immigrants aboard the Oops II experienced a variation on this theme. According to press reports, they were flown from Asia to Suriname in South America. After waiting there for nearly a year, some two hundred Chinese were taken by a big ship to somewhere in the Atlantic, then a small group was transferred to the Oops II.

Once they arrive in New York, the immigrants' families have seven days to pay the balance in full to the snakeheads. The arrivals are often detained until payment is made. Smuggling no longer requires a one-time payment to a coyote to guide one across the border, but a complicated arrangement that takes years. To pay off a $30,000 debt in three years requires a monthly payment of around $800, about the monthly income one can make in a restaurant or sewing factory. Illegal immigrants thus often work two or three menial jobs for less than the minimum wage and live fifteen to a room, where they sleep in shifts. The most important feature of modern Chinese smuggling, for immigrants, says Kwong, is that "even if the fees were paid by their relatives, they, too, have to borrow that large sum from others. The latter, in turn, expect fastidious repayment or face deadly consequences. The heavy debt burden gives the Chinese operations similarities to nineteenth century contract labor" (pp. 74-75).

Smuggling is a global cooperative effort that involves snaketails in Fuzhou, corrupt Chinese government officials, fishermen-smugglers on the coast, Taiwanese fishing and freight fleet owners, Malaysian shipping crews, safe-house operators and underworld facilitators from Bolivia to Russia to Turkey, passport and visa counterfeiters in Hong Kong, money launderers in New York, financial operators in China and the United States, and an army of snakeheads and enforcers who make sure that all debts are repaid. This vast operation is run by the Taiwanese crime syndicate, whose expertise derives from its experience in heroin trafficking.

Kwong describes the horrible conditions of travel and of sweated labor in America, as well as the terrorizing tactics of the snakeheads, in lurid detail. In fact, the language is frequently excessive (phrases like slave labor are ubiquitous), which gives the story an aura of sensationalism. Unfortunately Kwong, whose sympathies lie with the immigrants, may have unwittingly reinforced a host of negative racial representations that construct Chinatown as a netherworld of venality, corruption, and exploitation. His portrayal of modern-day China invokes the specter of the yellow peril. Deng Xiaoping's reforms, Kwong claims, have led to such economic disparity that over 110 million unemployed Chinese "roam around the country in search of work;" their destitution "recalls the human deprivation of the pre-1949 China." These conditions promote the emigration of 180,000 people a year, pushing the worldwide overseas Chinese population to 35 million and threatening an "international problem of serious proportions." Moreover, Kwong claims, Chinese government officials use emigration as a weapon in international politics (pp. 56-58). This argument is uncomfortably similar to that of the Asiatic exclusionists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the overheated rhetoric could be mistaken for the fear propaganda circulated by anti-immigration restrictionists today.

This sensationalist cast is exacerbated by the lack of coherent or substantive analysis. Kwong's account is based mostly on anecdotal evidence. Although he conducted hundreds of personal interviews, these are neither cited according to academic standards (which allow for the use of pseudonyms in sensitive cases) nor corroborated by other forms of evidence. To be fair, documenting illegal activity is not easy. But even if we accept the premises that illegal immigration is widespread and that illegal immigrants are terribly exploited, how do we know whether all Fuzhounese arrivals are shackled in basements and beaten until they pay up, or if such torture is limited? Any abuse, of course, is unconscionable, but surely it is important to know if such practices are as pervasive as Kwong suggests they are. The reader cannot help but wonder, since Kwong tells us that he could not find one person, either in New York or in Fuzhou, willing to condemn the snakeheards for inflicting such mountainous debts and onerous labor upon their victims.

Kwong's analysis of the political economy of illegal immigrant labor is thin and confusing. He emphasizes that Chinese immigrants are tied to low-wage jobs in Chinatown sweatshops run by co-ethnics. Immigrants, trapped in the ethnic enclave economy, never learn English and never leave Chinatown (pp. 115-116). Elsewhere, however, he tells us that illegal immigrants in Chinatown are regularly recruited to work for non-Chinese in uptown restaurants and construction firms, electronics factories in New Jersey, and farms on Long Island (p. 36). This seems to contradict Kwong's claim that Chinese are excluded from the secondary labor market.

This confusion is related to Kwong's muddled analysis of the ethnic enclave economy. He asserts that Chinatown has fundamentally changed from a segregated and economically marginalized ghetto of self-employed to a manufacturing center in contemporary capitalism's nexus of decentralized production based on outsourcing and subcontracting (p. 159). Illegal immigrants, he argues, make this system work because, as cheap and docile labor, they drive down wage and labor standards for all workers. But only the garment industry in Chinatown fits the profile of subcontracted work, and subcontracting is hardly a new phenomenon in the needle trades. What is new, and what is more central to the recent rise in sweatshop conditions in the garment industry, is the power of large retailers and branded labels like Walmart and JC Penny to set prices so low that contractors cannot possibly both make money and meet wage and hour standards mandated by law. Last year the Wall Street Journal wrote,

Department stores are making greater-than-ever demands from their suppliers to cover the heavy discounts and markdowns on their own selling floors. They want suppliers to guarantee their stores' profit margins. The demands are nearly wiping out all but the very biggest suppliers1.

Moreover, the garment industry employs mostly women, but the illegal immigrant population, though mixed, is mostly male. The latter work in Chinatown restaurants and services (which have no connection to large corporations) or, as Kwong acknowledges, outside of the community for non-Chinese employers in other lines of work.

In fact, Chinese work in both the ethnic enclave economy and in the so-called secondary labor market. What we need to know is what are the patterns and trends of employment, and how they affect the social conditions of Chinese immigrants. Are wages higher outside the community than in Chinatown? Are these employers legitimate, that is, do they uphold wage and hour standards mandated by law? Does participation in the secondary labor market, and with it, contact with non-Chinese employers and non-Chinese workers, promote greater familiarity with American society? Or are uptown restaurants and New Jersey factories merely low-wage outposts of Chinatown, similarly unregulated and isolating? Kwong does not even approach this kind of analysis. Thus, although Kwong makes statements about modern-day capitalism, decentralized production, and ethnic enclaves that sound familiar, these generalities hold little specific analytic content to help us understand the political economy of illegal Chinese immigrant labor.

There is, however, a logic to the employment trends of Chinese immigrant workers in New York, which Kwong describes. The key to this is not so much production outsourced to the ethnic enclave, but the more spatially dispersed and bifurcated political economy of what Saskia Sassen has called the global city. Cities like New York, which serve as headquarters for finance and corporate capital, spawn both agglomeration industries (business services from accounting firms to web-page designers) and a vast service sector that supports the living and social needs of the professional and business classes. The latter includes high-end restaurants, domestic services, and boutique industries, like small furniture makers in Queens, that cater to fussy urban elites. Immigrants are often the entrepreneurs of these services, and immigrant workers — Chinese, Korean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Russian, both legal and illegal —make up its low-wage labor force. Immigrant workers also continue to work in low-wage production in light manufacturing in the New York City area, but these jobs are on the decline. They remain only to the extent that manufacturers believe they can compete with third-world wages2.

It would be interesting to find out how the political economy of immigrant labor has affected the process of immigrant acculturation and assimilation. Kwong states rather categorically that Chinese immigrants are, both historically and today, unlike European immigrants, whose ghettoes were "way stations, necessary only until they adjusted to the new society and learned English and eventually integrated into American society" (pp. 11-12). This view evinces both a somewhat naïve and unproblematic view of European immigration and a willful ignorance of the social mobility of second-generation Chinese Americans which, if not as widespread as the media would have us believe, is nonetheless undeniable. The sweatshop remains a first-generation experience.

I am particularly troubled by Kwong's discussion of organized labor. At one level, Kwong is absolutely correct when he states that the exploitation of illegal workers hurts all workers. To the extent that employers pay undocumented workers less and hold the threat of deportation over them to thwart their resistance, wage and working standards are driven ever downward and unions are further weakened. I agree with Kwong that a "committed campaign" on the part of organized labor is needed to directly "confront big capital's strategy of using illegal immigrants to divide American labor" (p. 183).

But if Kwong is right to challenge the AFL-CIO to embrace all workers, including the undocumented, his extended critique of UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees) is one-sided and unsubstantiated. Kwong's hostility toward the union is articulated in categorical statements, such as the allegation that the union's "sole interest in the 1990s has been fighting for its own survival by holding on to dues paying membership" (p.190). The union only pretends to fight for its members (p.195 ); it does nothing to enforce contracts, and as a consequence "the workers have given up" (p.122). "Almost everywhere," Kwong says, "workers' voices are silent" (p.178).

Like all unions, UNITE has its share of problems that are legacies of both past policies and current market pressures. But it is far from being the passive and corrupt bureaucracy that Kwong suggests. The Chinatown local, 23-25, has embarked on a campaign to end Sunday work and the practice of withholding wages. The union conducts grassroots organizing of non-unionized garment workers in Brooklyn. UNITE was one of the most active unions in opposing employer sanctions in the 1986 IRCA (which Kwong also strenuously opposes), and it is the only union in the country that offers free legal services to undocumented members who are threatened with deportation. The union is also practically the only source of health-care benefits to Chinatown workers, something that Kwong barely acknowledges.

UNITE's efforts have not yet been able to stem the downward spiral in the garment industry that is impelled by the demands of retailers and cut-throat competition among contractors. Kwong too easily dismisses these market forces, however, and alleges that the problems faced by garment workers are the union's fault. This has led to dangerous alliances. Earlier this year Kwong went so far as to testify against UNITE before the Hoekstra committee in Congress, which is leading the Republican witch hunt against organized labor.

Kwong's opposition to UNITE may be understood in the contex of a long-standing division in American left-wing politics. Since the early part of the twentieth century, leftists and socialists have argued over whether they should work within trade unions or outside of them. At the risk of oversimplification, one view has held that the unions are the basic organizations of workers and that the left should build, defend, and support them against capital, while also struggling to make them democratic and responsive to the rank-and-file membership. An opposing view has seen trade unions as hopelessly corrupt and bureaucratic, or as props of the employers. In this view, a militant workers movement can only be built from without. My own sympathies lie with the first view; Kwong's clearly lie with the latter. Kwong touts the Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA), which claims to pursue a bottom-up organizing strategy, as the "only hope for Chinese immigrant workers" (pp. 199-200). This is a simplistic dichotomy that elides the fact that union organizing and community organizing are not mutually exclusive.

Furthermore, CSWA's claim to the grassroots remains at the level of rhetoric. CSWA has organized independent unions in Chinatown restaurants, but none actually have contracts with employers. Kwong acknowledges that the independents suffer from a lack of resources, full-time organizers, a strike fund, and so on, precisely the kinds of assets that established unions have. In fact, the independent unions in Chinatown faltered not so much because they lacked resources ( although that is a problem), but because they came up against the same market forces and employer tactics that the union faces. Fighting sweatshops is a difficult problem. Attacking the union is a best a diversion; at worst it helps the employers.

When Kwong turns to public policy, he does much better. He rightly points out that a punitive policy of hunting down illegal immigrants only drives them further underground, making them even more vulnerable to unscrupulous employers and criminal organizations. The solution, rather, lies in "strict, across the board enforcement of all US labor laws, affecting all employers in the US — whether foreign or US citizens, employing foreign documented, undocumented, or domestic labor" (p. 181). He also suggests a conference to establish international conventions against forced labor migrant trafficking. Although international attention has been focused on prostitution and child labor, all forms of indentured labor should be addressed (p.237).

I worry that these constructive proposals will be lost amidst Forbidden Workers' simplistic rhetoric which, in the last instance, may do more to reinforce negative views of Chinese immigration as a new yellow peril, immigrant workers as helpless victims, and the Chinese community as a secret world of coolie labor and violent tongs, than the author intended. Kwong has trodden a dangerous path.

Notes:

1. Stores Demands Squeeze Apparel Companies, Wall Street Journal, July 15, 1997.

2. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo (Princeton, 1991), especially Chapter 8.