Word: labors
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...Liang Ren's activities - though some had noticed the blue overalls and weird fishing nets dumped in the garbage outside a rundown house in one inner-city neighborhood. He had allocated new illegals to his various properties, trucking them to the Morecambe mudflats and profiting from their labor while they earned less than a few dollars per day. In the tight-lipped Liverpool Chinese community, such business deals had gone unquestioned...
...told a snakehead, as traffickers who help smuggle Chinese abroad are known, that he was ready. Many of his friends and family members have already gone. Now it is his turn. He wants to follow his older brother to England, where he's heard that the need for cheap labor is so great that the police don't crack down on illegal immigration. Little Lin, who doesn't want his full name used, knows the journey will take months and cost at least $28,000, and that he will be in debt for years. But he can't wait...
...many middle-class Chinese risk a perilous crossing, mountains of debt and years of grueling labor to start over in a strange land? Life in Fujian is not one of mass starvation or political persecution. But the lure of overseas gold remains great. When his restaurant in England is busy, Little Lin's brother, Big Lin, can make $600 a week, tax free, and despite his underground status, his life is hardly a misery. Big Lin does not know anyone who has been held hostage by a snakehead or enslaved in a factory. Nor has he ever been stopped...
...Czechs. Today, he has upgraded his trading from cloth to people. Willing people, he insists. "There are too many people in China, so we have to go abroad to make money," he says. "And in Europe, the people are old or lazy, so they need to import cheap labor." For the past seven years the snakehead has been searching for the equilibrium between supply and demand. This time, he's back in Sanming to shore up old contacts and size up new customers, sitting in a private room in one of the city's many tea houses. The call from...
...door. Once the customer gets to his destination, he calls his family, who then hand over to the snakehead's local contact the smuggling fee - usually a combination of savings and money borrowed from underground banks. The immigrant will then begin slowly working off the debt through poorly paid labor - a process that can take from two to 10 years. "Most people pay off their debts," says the snakehead. "It's not because we threaten them. It's because we know their family and their friends back home. People don't want to lose face in front of them...