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25 Crime L. & Soc. Change 1 (1996)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc25 and id is 1 raw text is: Crime, Law & Social Change 25: 1-16, 1996. 1 © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Bound for the Golden Mountain: The social organization of Chinese alien smuggling * SHELDON X. ZHANG' and MARK S. GAYLORD2 California State University, San Marcos; 2 City University of Hong Kong Abstract. This paper describes and analyzes the structural and operational features of Chinese alien smuggling. Interviews with aliens, smugglers and law enforcement officials in China, Hong Kong and the U.S. reveal this activity to be a complex process comprising a number of distinct operational stages. Our data suggest Chinese alien smuggling groups vary in their level of organization but most are best understood as task forces, or small groups of people assembled to perform a particular piece of work. These task forces are typically linked to international social networks characterized by overlapping, dyadic relationships; a high level of role differentiation; and a limited degree of hierarchy. Such groups are highly responsive to changing socio-legal and market constraints. Introduction Chinese alien smuggling is not a new phenomenon, but the involvement of organized crime groups in the large-scale transport of such cargo is a relatively recent development. Estimates of the number of Chinese annually smuggled into the U.S. vary, but officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) put the current figure at around 100,000.1 It has been estimated that more than half a million Chinese have been smuggled into the U.S. since 1984 alone.2 Unlike other forms of organized crime, such as gambling and drug traf- ficking, Chinese alien smuggling has received scant attention from social scientists.3 In large part, this is due to the formidable cultural and language barriers that make access to this topic difficult if not impossible for most Western criminologists. Thus most of what passes for conventional wisdom about the activity derives not from academic research but from the media. Nevertheless, nearly everyone who has investigated Chinese alien smuggling, * The study was supported in part by a grant from California State University. The authors are grateful to John Galliher for his comments and suggestions, and would like to thank Jorge Guzman and Darwin Chen of the U.S. INS for their assistance with the project. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Miami, 1994.

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