Putting illegal immigration in the spotlight again

I am sure many of you have read the shocking and disturbing news from the UK this week about the discovery of 39 dead bodies of Asian (Chinese and/or Vietnamese) illegal migrants being found in a lorry in Essex. This is all too familiar with similar cases of other such migrants dying when desperate to reach Europe - however, there are so many questions about this case that doesn't make any sense to me. Everyone is talking about Vietnam and China's economic miracle and when I was in Shenzhen, there were far more skyscrapers there than in all of London. So what the hell is going on then? Isn't the Chinese economy booming - so why are East Asian migrants risking their lives to come to the UK, a country in political crisis over Brexit and struggling with a weak currency? I can understand Syrian or Afghan refugees fleeing war trying to reach Europe, but Vietnamese and Chinese economic migrants? And furthermore, it seems that the container which contained these 39 migrants had left a port in Belgium - surely if they had made it as far as Belgium safely, why did they bother with the last difficult and dangerous leg of the journey when they were already in a very rich European country? To answer some of these questions, I gathered my old friend Peter whom I had interviewed in the past about illegal Chinese migrants and another good friend Wen from China doing her masters degree in London now.

Alex: Guys, why economic migrants from Vietnam and China taking this dangerous route to reach the UK? Why aren't they doing it legally within their own country, by going to a big city like Shanghai, Beijing or Hanoi to find work there then?

Peter: For the Chinese, there is nothing new about the concept of leaving your hometown to find work somewhere else. That is why there is a huge Chinese diaspora all over the world and so you have Chinatowns in North America, South America, Europe and even Africa. It may seem to you that there is an obvious, safer, legal route for them to take to Beijing or Shanghai but you only have to look at the situation for the migrant workers who have come from the countryside in the big cities, conditions are grim. There is work, but if you want a well paid job, you need a good education, you need skills and even if you have all that - competition is still very tough for the good jobs. Then people end up doing all kind of crap work just to pay the bills and it is a miserable existence for these people in the big cities because they show up full of hope and after a few years, they can barely make ends meet. For them, there's little difference in their heads between going to work in Beijing or in Birmingham, they just go to where they think they can get good opportunities. You have these migrant workers who leave their kids in the countryside to work in the city, the children are brought up by their grandparents and they see their kids for like one week a year during Chinese New Year - it's a pretty grim existence. It is much the same thing with Vietnam, the same reasons that compel people to seek better opportunities, to earn more money for their families. They see others in their countries getting rich and richer so people are no longer content being desperately poor for the rest of their lives and they have the right to aspire for a better future.

Wen: I am from Shenzhen and there has been a massive economic boom there, the new skyline of Shenzhen was built by migrant labours who work day and night, under horrific conditions for so little money. But even if you don't end up doing hard labour, I remember this shop near my parents' apartment where I used to get Bubble Tea. Nothing special, you know you can get Bubble Tea anywhere in China now, the place was run by a couple who had moved to Shenzhen from the countryside in the hope of striking it rich. But they were barely scraping by a living - how much profit could they make selling a low-value food product like that? They worked crazy long hours, their shop is always open 7 days a week, they never got any rest and that's pretty much the case for a lot of people in China who move to the big city with the hope to make a fortune. They work very hard for many years and make little money. So a lot of the migrants think, what's the point of moving to a big city in China where I can look forward to working myself to an early grave for very little money? The hours are long, the pay is low, it is not easy to succeed in a place like Shenzhen unless you have the right connections, the 关系 to help you even get your foot in the door in a prestigious company if you want a good job. So for these people from the countryside, they realize how hard life can be in the city. Going to a place like the UK is more like a mystery - an adventure for them, they already know that their chances of succeeding in a place like Shenzhen are very low - hence why not roll the dice and try another country altogether? The streets of Shenzhen are not paved with gold.

Alex: But come on, neither are the streets of London - so why would they be attracted to the UK then as a destination?

Wen: There is an element of perception vs reality here. There are rich people in London, in fact London is the richest city in all of Europe, with the highest concentration of rich people in any metropolitan area in Europe - even higher than Oslo, Geneva and Zurich. But of course, like China, there's also a huge problem with wealth distribution here. Of course we all know that poor people exist in the UK too, but the migrants who make the choice to come to the UK do so without thinking that they are going to live like the poorest of the poor in British society - they always imagine the best case scenario. It's like if you buy a ticket to see a movie, you do it with the expectation that the movie will be good, that you will enjoy watching it - you wouldn't spend the money on the ticket if you think it was going to be a total waste of time, that you will hate the movie. Thus you can say that a lot of these migrants are overly optimistic about their prospects here, even completely unrealistic but the ones who are pessimistic about the UK wouldn't come in the first place - they would simply stay in their own countries and as you said, maybe move to a big city within their own country. Generally, people in China do view the UK through rose tinted lenses, they think about this typical image of posh people in their beautiful country estates having afternoon tea and they all know who the Queen is, along with the royal family. A lot of British luxury brands have become very popular in China too - hence there is this association of the UK with luxury and wealth

Peter: The Chinese love Burberry and that's so English and that's their image of the UK. Furthermore, if I may point out please, there is a lot of similarity between what is going on in the whole people smuggling business and the universities.

Alex: Oh, like universities issuing visas to students who have no intention of studying, just to get them into the country?

Peter: No, not that. There are so many universities in the UK and those languishing at the bottom of the league table are issuing degrees to their students that are not worth the paper they are printed on. Yet they have a bright, cheery marketing campaign to convince the students that they will have such great prospects for the future if they do a degree there - so the students fall for the marketing campaign and sign up for an expensive degree programme, not realizing how hard it is to get a job after they graduate with a Mickey Mouse degree. I'm sure you remember there was that Hong Kong woman who ended up suing her university over this after she did just that. Likewise, in the people smuggling trade, they convince the migrants that they can easily get good, well-paid jobs in the UK, that they will have a bright future in England and they share stories about those who have made a lot of money there. And just like the students who sign up for those Mickey Mouse degrees, these migrants fall for the marketing campaign and cough up a lot of money to these people smugglers to get them to the West. Then once they arrive here and find themselves stuck in really awful jobs, being paid peanuts, working extremely long hours, living in quite nasty conditions, constantly afraid of the police out of fear of deportation, they have little choice but to keep a low profile because of the great shame they feel in getting themselves into this situation in the first place. In a sense, they were tricked into coming here by the people smugglers who want them to pay a lot of money to arrange the passage. It is a con, it is criminal and immoral on so many levels. 

Alex: But don't they realize they are entering the UK as illegal immigrants? Doesn't that prospect scare them at all?

Wen: Chinese people have a very different relationship to law and order than you in the West. Many Chinese people won't admit this, but China is a very corrupt country. It is the same situation in Vietnam because in both countries, there is no democracy, so the people who are in power can help their own friends and relatives with no impunity. Everyone from government officials to the police are corrupt - I remember this story from my childhood when there was a horrible car accident in Shenzhen. This drunk driver crashed into a group of pedestrians at high speed in a crowded street, killing a few people on the spot and that's the kind of shit you get the death penalty for in China. But it turns out that the driver was the son of a very high ranking official in the party, so somehow he wasn't persecuted for the accident because the police report claimed that there was a mechanical fault in the car causing the brakes to fail whilst ignoring the fact that the driver was totally drunk. Yeah, that's China for you - the powerful people don't face the consequences of their actions and can literally get away with mass murder of innocent people like that. We know the system is corrupt and broken; but what is our reaction? We grow up with a very different attitude - if you can bend or break the rules, then you will do so as long as you can get away with it. So for the illegal immigrants, they don't care - for them the only thing that matters is whether or not they will get caught, if there are any consequences for them as illegal immigrants in the new country. They have much less respect for the law and so when you simply don't respect the legal system, you wouldn't follow the rules.

Alex: I can see that. If they don't respect the laws, they have a different relationship with it - they don't mind or care which side of the law they are on. So by that token there is no pride in doing things legally and there's no shame in breaking the rules and doing things illegally - as long as they achieve the same goal in the end. So these people really don't care about being illegal immigrants in the UK. But regardless, don't they realize that simple things like opening a bank account would be impossible without having the right paper work? Life as an illegal immigrant is tough and you're constantly hiding in the shadows of society - like if you get injured and go to a hospital, you'll start wondering if they will start asking for ID and finding out that you're not here legally. And what if you become a victim of crime? You even can't go to the police then. These are just the very practical considerations about how it would affect your basic, ordinary, daily activities.

Peter: There are some richer Chinese and Vietnamese people who travel and take holidays abroad, then there are the poor ones who have never left the country. The latter are in the majority in China and Vietnam - so they have no freaking clue about how visas, work permits or even passports work. They don't realize how difficult it is to emigrate to the West legitimately, by following all the rules for highly skilled migrants. They are ignorant, they don't speak English - so it isn't hard for these people smugglers to convince them that they can easily settle down in England and get a good job there. Of course, for people like Wen, she is very aware of how hard it is even to get a student visa because she has show the Home Office all these documents before they would grant her the visa. So when someone tells these migrants that they can arrange passage for them to England, they are usually filling their heads with dreams of making a lot of money very quickly - they don't tell them just how dangerous the passage can be, or how the women can be sold into the sex trade or raped many times along the way. They tell these people that it is cheaper to travel to the UK via all these different countries through Eastern Europe, rather than admit that they cannot get on a direct flight to London from China because they would be subjected to interrogation the moment they arrive at Heathrow airport. And as Wen said, some of them realize that what they are doing is illegal, but that bothers them less than you think for the reasons she has highlighted.

Alex: There's a lot about corruption in communist China and Vietnam, is this a major factor in pushing people to leave their country? Is the media too afraid of mentioning this issue for fear of upsetting the China and Vietnam government?

Peter: Definitely it is a major factor. There are many corrupt people like border guards and people working in the transport industry whom the people smugglers bribe to look the other way when they are bringing in these illegal migrants across border - think about how many borders you would have to cross from Far East Asia to the UK, how many people you would have to bribe to look the other way. But these people are shown a wad of cash that represents a month's wages, so they take the money and look the other way because their own governments or employers don't take such good care of them, money talks; that is why the mafia can always bribe their way through any situation. Many people who are supposed to stop the illegal migration are paid very little for their work and hence a bribe is so tempting. 

Alex: Ah, think about the number of borders you'll have to cross by land if you're not taking a direct flight to London.

Wen: But to be fair, there is a feeling of frustration in China that given the endemic corruption that is built into the system, the people do sometimes feel that they can find better opportunities abroad. That's why so many Chinese people have left and many others do want to leave - fortunately, most of them do manage to do it legitimately, finding jobs and setting up businesses in countries with more relaxed immigration policies. If you grew up in a country where the system is corrupt, where you see the rich and powerful people in the party get away with crimes all the time, when you are surrounded by injustice, then you have a very different attitude towards being on the wrong side of the law by becoming and illegal immigrant. There's nothing morally upstanding about the people on the right side of the law anyway, so the lines between right and wrong, legal and illegal become blurred very quickly in this context. I remember in my hometown there was this incident where a factory was operating under quite hazardous conditions, the workers suffered such ill-health that they complained to the authorities - so what happened? Did they arrest the factory owner? Did they force him to improve working conditions? No, he paid a bribe to the government official to look the other way and sacked the workers who complained to the authorities. The money could have been spent to help the workers there, but instead it went to line the pockets of a government official who was only too happy to accept the bribe. So if that's the kind of society you grew up with, you stop caring too much about the legality of your status and what you do, just whether or not you can make enough money for your family as that is the only real thing that can make a real difference in their lives.

Peter: And the same shit happens in Vietnam too. It is communist, it is so corrupt - the people are very frustrated there.

Alex: Okay I understand that cultural aspect - but why the West? Why don't they try to make their fortunes in the big cities in China and Vietnam where at least they speak the language? It is a lot harder to make your way to a foreign country and then try to start from nothing. Those stories of migrants arriving in America with no more than the clothes they are wearing then becoming multi-millionaires in a few years, come on, that's really far fetched, how many migrants can make that kind of fortune? Sure there may be a handful of success stories sure, but how many migrants end up rich like that?

Peter: Well that is another key aspect - there is the perception amongst the Chinese that white people in the West are lazy, they don't want to work long hours like the Chinese, so the Chinese can easily go to the West, fill a gap and do the jobs that they white people are too lazy to do. That's been the case in Spain for example, where these Chinese businesses are completely changing the way retail works there - normally, Spanish shops are shut after lunch until the late afternoon for a long siesta but the Chinese businesses stay open all day, thus capturing the market of people who want to buy stuff in the afternoon! Spanish shops will now have to stay open if they want to compete with the Chinese shops. So if you move to Barcelona, you have that advantage over the locals - but if you move to Beijing, guess what? You work hard, so do the locals and there are only 24 hours in a day. The West is seen as the land of opportunity because of this cultural difference but this advantage is only available in the West where the locals are lazier than the Chinese.  They would rather compete against non-Chinese people than Chinese people, it is called picking the lowest hanging fruit, picking your battles. If you're interested in making money, you pick the easiest and fastest way to do so. And there's no smoke without fire - this is not based on some racist notion that Chinese people are smarter or better than white people: consistently across all Western countries, Chinese kids outperform the white kids in school and earn so much more money than their white counterparts - not just by a little but they blow the competition way out of the water.

Wen: And as they say, 无风不起浪 - there are very good reasons why these Asian migrants really want to go to the West.

Alex: Let me get this right: it is a perceived cultural advantage they have over non-Asian people because white people have this thing called work-life balance whilst us Asian people work harder than them, so they want to come to the West to compete against white people, instead of going to Shenzhen or Hanoi and competing against other Asian people?

Wen: Pretty much. You get all these stories of how so-and-so went to America with no more than $20 in his pocket and opened a shop, then today he is rich and owns a big chain of supermarkets. That kind of success story that conveniently omits any details about how this person became successful and it makes it sound so easy to make money in the West.

Alex: Why is it so easy for the mafia to smuggle people into the UK then? How can this happen in the first place?

Peter: The people smugglers are known as the 'snake head gangs' - they are notorious, you will undoubtedly hear about them each time a tragedy like that happens when many people die. But the reason why they are not in the news every week is because most of the time they get away with it - they do smuggle thousands of people successfully into the country without anyone noticing. If it didn't prove to be a successful and lucrative economic model for them, they wouldn't be in this business. Then once these people are here, they cannot work in regular jobs without the right papers - so there's this entire underground Chinese economy run by the Chinese mafia employing these illegal Asian immigrants. Police can be bribed to look the other way if they ever get too nosy - let's get real here. The government has slashed police budgets in times of austerity, they are underfunded, understaffed and even the salaries are stagnant - this has created perfect condition for the mafia involved in people smuggling because the border force don't have the resources to catch them and they can potentially bribe poorly paid government employees to look the other way. Starting salaries at the Border Force are pretty low and you'll have to be quite senior before you are taking home a good salary - that means the majority of people doing the dirty work to check for illegal immigrants coming into the UK are poorly paid and only their bosses are so well paid they wouldn't be tempted by bribes. The mafia must be laughing at the UK government at how they have rolled out the red carpet for these illegal immigrants - all this tough talk by the government about bringing down the number of migrants but it's all hot air: all talk, no action. The UK government is too broke to take real action.

Wen: I really need to get this off my chest - the UK government is targeting people who are following the rules like foreign students on student visas. They subject us to more and more scrutiny, make it harder and more expensive for us to get the visas we need - hello? We are the ones who are lawfully, obediently following the rules but that makes it easy for the government to target - why don't they go after the people smugglers, the Chinese mafia who are saying a great big fuck you to the laws and the rules of this government? It is so much harder to try to catch people like that because these mafia gangs are big and powerful, I'm just a university student - so the government picks a fight with people like me just so that they can look tough on immigration? It's all bullshit you know, this British government is so fucked up and the thing is that the people who want Brexit actually think that Brexit will solve all of this when for the mafia, it will be business as usually regardless of what the idiot Boris Johnson does with regards to Brexit. Heck, I bet the Chinese mafia didn't even noticed when he replaced Theresa May and we had a new prime minister in this country because none of what the government says or does affects them. They're so powerful and they are above the law, they act with apparent impunity. This is why the Chinese mafia are in this business in the first place - it can be done fairly easily, they have very big profit margins and they are able to get away with it. There are other rich countries far closer to China and Vietnam than the UK, but they actually do a much better job when it comes to securing their borders against illegal immigrants.

Peter: I do have a question for you Alex.

Alex: Okay, bring it on. Ask away.

Peter: A lot of the migrants come from Fujian province in China and you self-identify as Fujian, is that correct Alex?

Alex: Well my mother's side of the family are indeed from that part of China and I do speak the Fujian dialect, otherwise known as Hokkien (in Fujian dialect) and I do indeed consider that to be my mother tongue even if I am not fluent in it.

Peter: Can explain why Fujian people like you have this spirit to take risks and venture to another country far away?

Wen: Good question, I'm interested to hear what you have to say on this Alex.

Alex: There isn't anything in particular about being Hokkien that makes me more adventurous or brave when it comes to immigration. My mother who speaks Hokkien as her first language would be the last person to ever move from Singapore where she was born. It is also a calculated decision about whether you will be better off in a new country or not, you do a simple cost benefit analysis. So you can't assume that all Hokkien people are keen to move abroad to another country but for those who did so, the Hokkien people did have their clan association - in Chinese it is known as 福建会馆 and that meant that even in the 1840s, Hokkien people could arrive in Singapore, show up at the clan association and get all kinds of help to settle into their new life in Singapore with people who are also from Fujian province and speak the same language. There are many other similar 'Hokkien clan associations' set up in various cities around the world with a Chinese diaspora and they could have different names but they essentially perform the same functions. It is not just the Hokkien people who have set up these kinds of associations but other groups from all over China have done similar things as well but just not quite on the scale as the 福建会馆.  I think the clan associations - these 福建会馆 - are the benevolent face of the Fujian diaspora, whilst the notorious snake head mafia gangs are the opposite, it is the evil side of the Fujian migrants. In Singapore, the clan associations have evolved: they no longer perform the function of welcoming new migrants from China today, but they play a vital role in promoting and preserving the Hokkien language and culture.

Another important factor you have to consider is the legacy of of Hokkien migrants - if you come from an area where you have loads of friends and relatives who have left China to seek their fortunes in different parts of the world, then it becomes fairly normal to do just that. On my mother's side of the extended family, I have relatives in places like Singapore, France, Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, America, even Brazil - it is not so much like "it is in my blood so I am destined to roam the world", but rather I am merely doing something that has been done by so many others it doesn't feel like a big deal. Let's compare this to higher education - my eldest sister is the first person in my family to have made it to university and be a graduate, like it was a really big deal for my parents then. My second sister followed in her footsteps and graduated too and by the time it came to me, not only did my two older siblings go to university but so many of my other cousins did as well - it was the norm to be a graduate by the time it came to my turn. Hence I had to outdo them by becoming a scholar rather than just any other graduate. Now imagine if I came from a family in a different part of China where none of my family has ever left for the big cities like Shanghai or Beijing, never mind ventured abroad and then none of my family members even went to university - that would make me going to university in the UK and France a lot less likely and even if I wanted to, I am not sure I would have had the support of my family. Then of course, there are people who were willing and able to help you get to another country but I hope that most Hokkien people realize that it is far better to do things the legal way by getting a work permit than to deal with the dangerous Chinese snakehead mafia.

Wen: Yes, there's a big difference between the people from Fujian province and those from the interior of China because of the geography of Fujian, having a long coastline on the Pacific Ocean with big port cities like Xiamen and Quanzhou which have been thriving. The Fujian people have always been involved in international trade, dealing with different foreigners coming to China for business and as a consequence, leaving China as well for better opportunities abroad too.

Alex: The latest news from the BBC is that there are at least 6 Vietnamese people amongst the dead in the container and that they had traveled first to China, then to France before going to Belgium - then they died somewhere between leaving Belgium and arriving in England. I have a question please: if they wanted to get to a better country for economic reasons, they are already in France and Belgium for crying out aloud. They were alive and well in France and then Belgium - why make that last dangerous leg of the journey to the UK? It is not as if they are going to make that much more money in the UK, hell no. I have lived in both France and Belgium and they are both very rich countries - I even find the prices in central Brussels somewhat more expensive than London. Why not just say, "let's make a new life in beautiful Belgium"?

Peter: Alex, I know you speak French fluently and hence that allowed you to live and work in France and Belgium successfully but you have to understand that for a lot of these migrants, they don't speak English, never mind another European language. So for these people to want to find a job in Europe, they are therefore 100% completely dependent on the Chinese mafia to find them employment - so for them, it's not like they are solely paying to be smuggled into the UK. No, they pay a huge amount of money to the people smugglers to get them to the UK and then find them employment - it was reported that in the case of the Vietnamese, one of the migrants paid as much as 30,000 euros to be smuggled here. That fee would include not just the travel but probably expenses for food and accommodation once they get to the UK and then what they had to pay to find them employment within the businesses run by the Chinese mafia. So it's not like these migrants get to pick and choose, "I want to go to Paris for a year, then move onto Brussels." They will be given a "take it or leave it" package for a fixed price, it is non-negotiable and there's probably a long list of people waiting to take your place if you decide not to go for it.  Given that these illegal migrants have no work permits to find any kind of legitimate work, they have little choice but to go with this kind of 'package deal'. The fact that they passed through two rich countries is a moot point - the Chinese mafia had jobs for these people in the UK, not France or Belgium. Mind you, if these illegal migrants ever got caught in a place like Belgium or the Netherlands, they will almost certainly be deported back to Vietnam/China - the UK is more ineffective due to chronic under funding and a less effective system.

Wen: Yes, I think you grossly underestimate how hard it is to find work in this country - I am here on a student visa, I have the right to work part time and yet I am subject to so many checks for everything, even if I were to do a small job for one weekend. There are more Chinese people in the UK than say somewhere like Belgium, hence the mafia here is far better established. It's not like the UK economy is so successful and that the prime minister here is doing such a great job - hell no, it's far more to do with the fact that the Chinese mafia are already deeply entrenched here in the UK for many decades and have carved out the turf where they operate, hence this is just a good place for them to do business to employ all these illegal migrant workers. Logistically it is far easier to get these illegal migrants to somewhere like France or Belgium because they can slip over the border from Eastern Europe and once they are in the Schengen zone, they can move around freely. The UK is difficult to get to because of the geography and it is not in the Schengen zone.

Alex: What I found perplexing is the BBC report about all these Vietnamese migrants who have made it as far as France, the country with the biggest Vietnamese diaspora in Europe as Vietnam was a former French colony as part of French Indochina. France is a rich country, so many Vietnamese people now call it home after fleeing there during the Vietnam War. But no, these people were adamant to leave France and try to make it to the UK one way or another, even risking death to do so. In my humble opinion, the UK has nothing to offer migrants that France doesn't have and in many ways, France is a much better option for these people. Okay you have to learn French but so what? Is conjugating French verbs a fate worse than death? It is crazy. It is irrational. But okay, I get what you're saying, the Chinese mafia are far more entrenched here in the UK than in say France, Denmark or Germany. But surely if you want to make it to the UK one way or another, there must be easier ways to get across the border illegal than risking suffocation in these trucks.

Peter: The fake passport route is quite well known and has been taken by many refugees. So the Syrian refugee obtains a fake passport that allows him to fly to a small airport in Eastern European country - some of these smaller airports have budget airline flights to the Middle East and they don't really care about asking too many questions. This is because most asylum seekers don't want to claim asylum in a place like Bulgaria, Serbia or Romania because of the huge language barriers there and the fact is they don't treat refugees very well either there. So even if they suspect someone is traveling on a fake passport, they tend to look the other way because detaining the person would mean taking the responsibility of having to look into the case, spending money incarcerating such individuals and the governments are not interested in that, particularly since they know these refugees are just passing through on their way to somewhere like the UK. Once they are in Eastern Europe, they are then in a position to get on a flight to their final destination: they only need to fool the people at a busy airport to let them onto a flight with a fake ID or passport which is easily available on the black market at the right price. Then once they arrive in the UK, they can claim asylum if they are from somewhere like Syria or Afghanistan. However, if they show up and try to claim asylum as a Vietnamese refugee, the UK authorities are going to say, "the Vietnam war ended in 1975 hence you are an economic migrant, not a refugee. Asylum refused." So they really have no choice but to use far more clandestine methods to enter the UK and avoid any contact with the authorities here.

Alex: But if I wanted to get into the UK illegally, I would just buy a fake ID on the black market as that's so much easier.

Peter: There is a huge market for fake IDs and passports in Europe, counterfeiters are always playing a game of cat and mouse with the authorities trying to clamp down on these fake IDs. Passports are stolen and altered, so for example Alex, you and I are British citizens but we are Chinese-looking, so there would be criminal gangs trying to pick our pockets at airports because a genuine British passport with a Chinese looking guy's photo would be worth a lot on the black market because it would change hands many times and be used and reused once it gets into the hands of these people smugglers. Our passports are actually far more highly prized than say the British passport of a white person with blond hair and blue eyes. However, you need photo ID to get on a plane or cross a border and once you tamper with a document like a passport, then the airports for example have all kinds of high tech ways to detect forgery or genuine documents that had been tampered with. Of course, major airports like London Heathrow, Amsterdam Schipol or Paris CDG would have the best technology and plenty of manpower to deal with this challenge but a lot of the smaller airports simply wouldn't have the technology nor the manpower - furthermore, the majority of the people traveling at not criminals, but just ordinary people trying to get on with their journey and if any delay that you cause to them is likely to ignite tempers So people working in smaller airports are under a lot of pressure as well and most of these airport or airline staff are just not paid enough to give a fuck either way, they just wanna get the passengers out of there and finish their shift.

Wen: Is the new very high-tech biometric passport with the embedded microchip supposed to stop all this fraud then?

Alex: Exactly, often when I travel around Europe, I use e-passport gates and never speak to a real person. I just slide my passport into the machine, it is scanned, then the machine sees that my face matches the photo in the passport, then I am allowed in. The machine measures the ratio of the distance between my eyes, nose, ears and mouth, along with other parts of my face - that ratio has to match the ratio of the photo in the passport, once the machine determines that it is a good enough match, it will simply let me through. You'll be amazed how many idiots don't know how to insert their passport correctly or stare at a screen for two seconds for the computer to do its work - so what will happen is that they protest that the machine doesn't work when really, they're the ones being the fucking idiots; they will then have their passports examined by a human being who will decide if they should be admitted or not. So it is possible for someone traveling on a stolen passport to simply play the part of the clueless idiot and still get through, but it then comes down to their acting ability and should the customs officer decide to ask a few question, then they should at least be able to speak enough English to answer those questions. I think most of the time the border police in most countries are trying to do their jobs, but I get fed up when I get targeted sometimes because I am an Asian person traveling on a British passport.

Wen: Really? Like, seriously? What happened?

Alex: In January this year, I was detained in Kutaisi airport in Georgia and subject to extended questioning, I was eventually allowed to enter but it was stupid as they had no reason to suspect me of being an illegal immigrant. I had just flown from the UK to Georgia and their country is so freaking poor, no refugees will want to go there in search of a better life. I think I simply encountered a young lady who was too keen to do her job. Then there was that time when I was traveling from Germany to the UK on my Singaporean passport, like this was years ago before I had naturalized as a British citizen. The German lady at Frankfurt airport went through every page of my passport and saw that I had a student visa for France - she then switched from English to French to see if I was the same person who got the student visa for France, her reasoning being that if I had studied in France, I should be able to answer her questions in French. I then had an interview with her in French in which I told her in great detail which university I studied at in Paris, where I was living, what my student experience was like in France, what I liked about studying in Paris, even why French supermarkets are so much better than British ones - I don't know if she was an overly zealous young trainee trying to use her rather fluent French at work to prove a point to her superiors or if they had genuinely suspected that I wasn't the rightful owner of that passport! But yes, that interview in Frankfurt airport took about 30 minutes - she was polite and professional, they did let me go get on that flight after I impressed them with my flawless French and interesting stories about my student life in Paris. You won't believe how many times I had been stopped in France and Germany traveling on a Singaporean passport, but in all cases I was merely questioned and released and I had never been refused entry.

Peter: I think being questioned at airports will become less of a thing now especially with these e-passport gates, but like you said, if you are going to fly to a small airport in a place like Georgia, then yeah you will have to speak to a person.

Alex: There's so much more that we can talk about but I need to bring this to a conclusion guys. So what are some of your feelings and reaction when you read a story like that in the press? Wen, can you go first and tell me what you feel?

Wen: Sadness of course, intense sadness - that's a really horrible way for these poor people to die. I came to the UK to do my studies because I am lucky enough to have parents who can afford to send me here as a foreign student, these people were born into families who weren't as rich so they had to seek a different route to try to get a better life. I think that a lot of people in the West still don't understand China - it is a country of huge contrasts. On one hand, you have some of these crazy rich Asians here, you should see some of the foreign students here from China, like their parents are obviously crazy rich and they are renting some incredibly luxurious apartments in central London whilst normally, British university students live in these modest halls of residence type hostels. I heard one Chinese student complain about having to park her car a ten minute walk away from the university campus and how hard it is to find parking spaces - I'm like, what? Students don't drive! We walk, we cycle, we use public transport but she is obviously so rich she went to buy herself a nice car and that's one end of the spectrum. Then you have the other extreme where people are so poor, so desperate, they will risk death from suffocation to come to the UK to work in atrocious conditions for so little money - so this confuses white people in the UK, like they don't know whether China is rich or poor today, they don't understand that it is both, simultaneously: like it is both rich and poor at the same time and these white people cannot get their heads around it. It's called wealth or economic inequality. Life is inherently very unfair, as you don't get to choose your parents.

Peter: I share Wen's frustration - I can't help but feel that some white people just wanna pigeon hole all Chinese people, as if we're a monolithic entity when clearly we're not. But from my previous work as a legal interpreter, I can tell you that this story only made the headline because the large number of deaths involved and how it is now a murder investigation. If they had opened the lorry and found a group of migrants alive inside, it wouldn't be news at all - the media wouldn't be interested, the police would process the people and this is the kind of thing that happens everyday in this country as many illegal migrants continue to enter the country. Illegal migrants do a good job of staying out of sight, they rarely come into contact with the general public and generally just lying low, so many of us are not even aware if we're living on the same street as them. Whilst it is undoubtedly hard to police our borders, I think the authorities can do a much better job in cracking down on the places which do use illegal migrant workers. A lot has been said about Vietnamese nail bars - well, how often do the police go in there to check if the workers there have the right to work? If you make it a lot harder for these Chinese mafia gangs to operate in the UK, then it would stop them being able to make as much money here - that would stop them from trying to lure all these illegal migrants over to the UK only for them to become slave labour at the mercy of the mafia here in the UK. The more the public are aware of this problem, the more resources the authorities will dedicate to it - hence at least, I hope that some good would come out of this tragic episode.

Alex: Even if you really crack down on the Chinese mafia here in the UK, you cannot eradicate them totally, you would simply diminish their presence in the UK and you would drive them to another country. The Chinese mafia are so powerful and it's not something a problem you can simply solve with a handful of police raids. A lot of people don't understand how organized crime works. Whether or not the victims were Vietnamese, Chinese or of any other nationality, it is still important that we try to understand why they are pushed to make this perilous journey in the first place and I hope that the governments of these victims back in Vietnam and/or China will do far more to dissuade people from using people smugglers. If you want to work abroad, do it legally, there are countries that will give you a work permit for certain kinds of work and a good example is the Philippines - so many Filipinos work abroad: from the UK to the Middle East to Singapore, but they do so legally with proper work permits because the system is far more organized in the Philippines. So whether you're coming to London to work as a nurse or to Singapore to work as a maid, the government will at least ensure that the people who do want to work abroad can go through proper legal channels to get work permits and have proper legal status in the country where they are working. They would never be smuggled into these countries under dangerous circumstances. Vietnam and China both have a lot to learn from the Philippines in this aspect; the solution is to issue more work permits for these lower paid jobs: put the mafia out of business. I think that's the long term solution.

A very special thanks to my good friends Peter and Wen for helping me out in this discussion on this very difficult topic and you have any further thoughts about this issue, then please do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.