Patrick Radden Keefe (2021) The Snake Head. An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream.

Patrick Radden Keefe starts with the long-playback-shot. 6^th June 1993. A routine police patrol near Coney Island. National Park Police Officers doing the graveyard shift. A volunteer auxiliary force. They had to oil their handcuffs because of the sea air and lack of use. But they spot a ship on the sandbars and hear the screams from the water. Breezy Point, notable for keg parties, has become a graveyard, crime and rescue scene involving Coast Guards, helicopters, firefighters and a scramble to put a media spin on the story of why there were so many Asian refugees in the water.    

The ship was called the Golden Venture. Radden conducted 300 interviews between 2005 and 2008 with, for example, FBI agents, police and immigration officers, but also those that were in the water that Sunday night, and members of the American Chinese community.

Those undocumented migrants in the water came from Fujian in China. In 2000, 58 Fujianese suffocated in the back of a truck destined for London. Stowaways were discorded shipping containers throughout the 1990s. Little Sister Ping operated out of restaurant in Rotterdam. She was advertising, taking on the moniker of a central figure in the book and Snakehead operation, Sister Ping, Undocumented migrants were and are business opportunities. The heroin trade also made super profits, but the market was saturated. People smuggling was supply inelastic which pushed up prices. The product could also walk and no conditions were too primitive or risk too great.

A documented American Fujianese community leader noted: ‘it was better business than drug trafficking. More profit. Less risk. You get caught and plead guilty right away and you only go to jail for six months.’

The CIA suggested there were 50 000 to 100 000 illegal immigrants arriving every year. The US immigration service was dealing with 100 000 new applicants for legal status. Around 2.6 million illegal migrants were already in the US. That number was greater than and exceeded the next twelve countries listed together.

New routes followed the path of bribery, corruption and least resistance. ‘Geopolitical black holes’ like Guatemala.  In the 1990s, for example, Fujianese Snakeheads worked with Mohawk Indians. They smuggled thousands the reservation with the migrants ending up in New York. Authorities estimated the smuggling ring made $170 million before it was dismantled. Sister Ping, an unassuming Fujianese migrant to New York in the 1990s, who spoke little English, her fortune from people smuggling was estimated at $40 million. She painted herself as a modern-day Robin Hood figure, helping the poor huddled masses of her home village get to the promised land of unlimited riches and opportunity. From 1991-1993, she helped bring in a minimum of 5300 Chinese, many from her home province, using 34 different ships flying flags on convenience like the Golden Venture’s 90 passengers stowed below deck, paying around $30 000— $80 000 a head, a multimillion dollar cargo caught on a sandbar, but adding an estimated $7 billion to the Fujian Chinese economy.

Radden Keefe suggests the notion of ‘acceptable risk’ is part of the transaction. Ten dead from the Golden Venture and the other 80 arrested and incarcerated for up to four years seems like a terrible deal. But those sent back to China were persecuted. One migrant, for example, having both his legs broken in prison and taunted that he would run away again. Economic migrants could also be refugees fleeing persecution; one did not and does not cancel out the other, but the political climate penalises both equally. Many of the migrants deported from the Golden Venture found their way back to New York.

The acceptable risk model has led to the anti-people political parties that spread hate as a working model. The irony of dog whistle politics from home secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman is their parents are immigrants. Members of the National Front take the same kind of approach to people of colour, like them, as the Hitler Youth did to Jews. Sainted Margaret Thatcher, for example, suggested sending Ugandan immigrants to an unspecified island, not Britain, of course, because we’re not that sort of island. With an immigration backlog of 140 000 still waiting to be processed, the imaginary island grows bigger. Stopping the small boats and sending migrants to Rwanda doesn’t make economic or moral sense. Patrick Radden Keefe’s argument for dealing with migrants is mirrored by arguments for dealing with the effects of global warming in which tens of millions, perhaps billions, will be on the move in the next twenty years. He suggests international cooperation and suggests we’re only as strong as our weakest nation. With most of the world’s wealth projected to be in the hands of a handful of individuals by 2030, a more radical approach to levelling up would be taxing the rich. Snake heads come in many forms. Just look at the moron’s moron and former 42^nd American President. His mother and father were immigrants. Snakehead Trumpet is far more toxic than Sister Ping ever was and on a much larger scale.