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Local police are accustomed to dealing with illegal border crossings but were astounded by the video of 15 Chinese immigrants unfolding themselves from the back of a sport-utility vehicle near this small border town.
The SUV appeared abandoned when police rolled up early on a recent Saturday morning. But when Border Patrol agents arrived and swung open the double rear doors, the Chinese immigrants tumbled out, squinting in the sunlight.
"They were in bad shape," La Joya Police spokesman Joe Cantu said.
The immigrants were silent, able to communicate only with hand gestures. They did not try to flee. One man wanted to use Cantu's cell phone. When Cantu asked for the number, he was handed one with a New York area code.
Two more Chinese immigrants would be picked up nearby later that day, and another group of nine was caught near the border about 50 miles (80 kilometers) away a few days later.
More than nine out of 10 illegal immigrants detained at the U.S.-Mexico border are Mexican. But for years, this easternmost sector of the border has had more than its share of what the Border Patrol calls "other than Mexicans" or OTMs, most of whom come from Central America.
But overall, the number of Chinese caught along the U.S.-Mexico border has been declining since the U.S. stopped its policy of releasing most illegal immigrants from outside Mexico until they could appear before an immigration judge.
After surpassing 2,100 in 2005 and 2006, the number of Chinese immigrants caught along the southwest border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, fell last year to 837, slightly more than 1 percent of all OTM apprehensions, according to Border Patrol data. In the first eight months of this fiscal year, which began October 1, 512 Chinese were caught along the border with Mexico.
The specifics of how this group of Chinese immigrants ended up in South Texas were not known, but the methods and smuggling routes have been evolving for more than a century. Most pay an average of $55,000 to be shuttled from China to a U.S. destination by an elaborate smuggling operation, said Peter Kwong, a sociology professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
If they get caught, they request asylum, and lawyers are often hired by the Chinese smugglers, who will not get full payment unless the immigrants arrive at their destination, Kwong said.
Since 1882, when the U.S. began a crackdown on Chinese immigration that would last decades, Chinese have been crossing the Mexican border. Early on, most of the traffic was along the border with California because Chinese rode ships into Mexican ports on the Pacific coast, Kwong said.
"This was a very early route," said Kwong, who wrote "Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor."
Eventually, though, Chinese immigrants began sailing directly into U.S. ports.
The Mexican route regained popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when U.S. ports became less accessible, Kwong said. The Golden Venture incident, when a ship carrying 286 Chinese immigrants beached off the New York borough of Queens in 1993, drew broader attention to the issue of human smuggling and further tightened access.
More Chinese began flying into U.S. airports and requesting asylum, Kwong said.
When tighter restrictions on inbound international flights were introduced after the September 11 attacks, smugglers began looking for less secure airports, Kwong said.
Immigration attorney Hongxin Shi joined the Texas law practice of Paul Esquivel last year, after Esquivel saw a need for Mandarin-speaking attorneys at the Willacy County Processing Center, the largest immigrant detention facility in the U.S.
Shi, who has about 20 pending immigration cases with Chinese immigrants, said he has heard of immigrants flying into Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico to begin the journey north.
In March 2007, Mexican federal police detained 81 Chinese immigrants and 22 Mexican immigration officers at the Cancun airport. They believed that the Chinese were hiding in the airport with the help of the immigration officials until they could begin the next leg of their journey north to the United States.
In Mexico, they meet "coyotes," or smugglers specializing in crossing the U.S. border, who have been arranged by their Chinese smugglers. "It's like a subcontractor," Kwong said.
For years, Chinese and fellow "other than Mexican" illegal immigrants were processed and released with a date to return for a court hearing. The process was known as "catch and release."
Only about one-third of those released showed up in court, according to a 2005 report prepared for Congress.
That began changing in late 2005 and early 2006, with a policy that sought to close that loophole.
Non-Mexicans caught trying to enter the U.S. now are steered into a streamlined process for "expedited removal."
They are detained at centers like Willacy until they can appear before an immigration judge. The Border Patrol credits the end of catch and release with the sharp drop in OTM apprehensions.
Still, "we do encounter people from all over the world," said Daniel Doty, Border Patrol spokesman for the Rio Grande Valley sector.
Just days before the 17 Chinese were picked up in La Joya, 13 Eritreans and five Ethiopians were caught in nearby Hidalgo.
