While many gain favor by spending and studying, the lot of others is not so rosy

Ke Sudi, a 20-year-old delivery worker from Fujian, arrived in the back of a lorry in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam on June 18, 2000. His parents had paid 4,000 pounds ($6,200; 5,600 euros), the first installment of a 20,000-pound bill, to a gang of smugglers to get him to the United Kingdom. He had left China earlier that month, with 59 other Chinese nationals. By the time the lorry arrived at the English port of Dover, 58 had suffocated to death. This tragedy, and the ones that followed in the years after, shone a light on the exploitation of Chinese immigrants.

Hsiao-Hung Pai, originally from Taiwan, was one of the first journalists in Britain to report on the phenomenon of undocumented Chinese workers in the UK. She says: "Dover was the first time I really started to think about the issues and about people being smuggled from China with huge debts on them. It shocked me."

Pai went on to write two books about Chinese immigrants. Her reports for The Guardian about Morecambe Bay, where 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned, were turned into a feature film.

She relates the story of Zhang Guohua, who died in a factory in the town of Hartlepool after stamping the word Samsung onto microwave ovens for 24 consecutive hours. "Nobody (in the Chinese community) knew about him when he died. He died from overworking. They didn't know what factory it was."

Zhang's death, together with events at Dover and Morecambe Bay, prompted new legislation to deal with the problems of gangmasters, forced or compulsory labor, slavery and servitude in the UK. Measures were also introduced to reduce the possibilities of unskilled workers from outside the European Union working in the UK in a regular or mainstream way. But the problem of undocumented immigrants, and their trafficking and exploitation has not vanished.

It also took loss of life for authorities in Italy to start paying more attention to the status and working conditions of Chinese immigrants. In Prato, Tuscany, seven Chinese immigrants died in a fire in a Chinese-run business on Dec 7, 2013. After this, Italian authorities sent 73 inspectors to check health and safety standards in the town's thousands of Chinese workshops. They found that 20 percent of those working in them were illegal Chinese immigrants.

Wu Bin, a senior research fellow at the China Policy Institute of Nottingham University, has spent 10 years researching and writing about Chinese immigration to Europe. He says the isolation and low profile of Chinese immigrant workers have made it difficult to help vulnerable people.

"The isolation is related to many factors including local language, ethnic labor market, legal status as well as familiarity with the host culture," Wu says.

"In general, newcomers, the unskilled and people from poor rural villages in China are more likely to accept or tolerate the social isolation. The nature of social isolation for me is better attributed to the structure and culture of diaspora Chinese communities. It is difficult for immigrant workers to get rid of it."

Thierry Mariani, a French politician from the Union for a Popular Movement, presented a paper on Chinese immigration to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe's Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons on April 23.

In it, he says that more stringent border controls have led to an expansion in the scope of illegal smuggling and trafficking networks.

"The use of paid immigration brokers, referred to as snake heads, varies from where the immigrants originate and to where they plan to travel in Europe. A recent police operation in Spain and France raided a human trafficking ring, which was charging 40,000 to 50,000 euros ($43,700; 54,600) per person to smuggle Chinese immigrants to Europe and the US."

Chinese immigrants make contributions to China - through remittances - and also to their host countries. But irregular immigrants are also at risk of exploitation, disputes, forced labor and human trafficking. The International Organization for Migration's Capacity Building for Migration Management in China project ran between 2007 and 2010, reaching nearly 400 senior public officials in China and nearly 1.5 million potential immigrants, in an effort to improve the working conditions of Chinese immigrants in Europe and promote greater awareness of trafficking and forced labor.

According to the Supreme People's Court, the number of cases of trafficking considered by the courts has almost halved over the past three years, from 1,918 in 2012 to 978 last year. The court attributes this decline to tougher law enforcement. But it said in February that there was an upward trend in some areas and for certain types of trafficking such as forced marriage and prostitution.

"As expected from its remarkable economic development in recent years, China has slowly changed from a predominantly source country to a predominantly destination country, and new regional trends such as marriage immigration are changing the complexion of the trafficking phenomenon," says Par Liljert of the IOM in Beijing.

"Around the world, though, traffickers respond quickly to law enforcement success, so authorities need to remain ahead of the curve and keep laws and procedures up to date."

Stories of Chinese doing well in Europe - snapping up apartments, going on shopping sprees and filling university campuses - can hide the darker side of immigration. "People have forgotten about them," Pai says. "Middle-class China is only half the story. The image of Chinese immigrants in Europe is that they are all affluent. The people who are illicit here (in the UK) are very isolated. They won't interact with the rest of the Chinese community; their lives are restricted to work."

riazat@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 06/05/2015 page9)