Foreign and Military Affairs

Efforts to speed up dealing with illegals

By Tan Yingzi (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-11 08:35

WASHINGTON - America's top immigration official would like to see the United States and China working more closely to speed up the repatriation of Chinese illegal immigrants.

Efforts to speed up dealing with illegals

Twenty people are detained after they tried to pass a frontier inspection facility with fake identities in Dalian, Liaoning province, on June 17, 2008. [China Daily]

John Morton, director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told China Daily that a growing number of Chinese illegal immigrants are being detained and the US is facing huge pressures in verifying their identities and repatriating them.

"It is a big concern for both governments," Morton said. "But we have difficulty in obtaining travel documents in a timely fashion."

The two countries have been working on the issue under a repatriation framework over the past few years, but the problem now is that it takes too long to obtain travel documents from the Chinese government, he said.

It usually takes more than 120 days to get documents for Chinese nationals, compared to just about a month from other countries.

Morton, who will visit China next week, said the US is hoping to work with relevant Chinese departments, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to see if the two sides can reduce the amount of time it takes to get the documents.

"The longer detention time means that it will cost us a lot of money and the Chinese nationals in question have to stay in detention for too long, sometimes over six months," he said.

"Occasionally, it leads us to difficult situations. Under our laws, we have to release people who we really shouldn't release."

Morton regards his six-day trip as "historic" as he is the first ICE director to visit China since the agency was set up in 2003.

His meetings with Chinese officials will cover a range of issues, with the repatriation of Chinese nationals as one of the main items.

Since the global financial crisis badly affected the job market in the US, Washington has been criticized for not doing enough to deport illegal immigrants, who are often blamed for "stealing" American jobs with below-average wages.

Last financial year, ICE removed a record 380,000 illegal immigrants from the US.

Morton said the number of illegal immigrants in the US is still high, although the latest Pew Center report says the total number has declined in the past five years.

"Overall, illegal immigration has declined in the last few years, largely because of the economic recession and increased law enforcement efforts of the government, including ICE," Morton said.

He estimated that a significant number of the estimated 11 million or more people in the US illegally are from China.

Large-scale illegal immigration from China to the US began in the 1970s. During the peak period between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, about 50,000-100,000 Chinese illegally entered the US every year, most of whom were from coastal provinces such as Fujian and Guangdong. The past few years have seen a rebound of illegal immigration from China after a decline.

Chinese authorities have reiterated that China strongly opposes any form of illegal immigration and accepts the repatriation of all verified China nationals. China also wants the US to adopt stricter preventive measures and not give political asylum to illegal immigrants.

Encouraged by the past success in cross-border issues, Morton is optimistic about working with China and is looking forward to strengthening the law-enforcement relationship between the two countries.

"Seeds of success have already been laid," he said. "We have demonstrated that we can work well together.

"The question is how we can do them more often, more regularly and how we can build the relationship, trust and partnerships so we can do more of this work with a less bureaucratic approach."

In addition to intellectual property and people-smuggling cases, Morton also wants to work with Chinese authorities about Americans who travel to China to engage in improper sexual activities, such as with minors.

ICE's primary mission is to protect national security, public safety and the integrity of US borders through criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration. It has offices in 45 countries, including two offices in China - Beijing and Guangzhou.