Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and OxyContin, are two of the greatest non-fiction books I’ve read. And while I had a keen interest in the subject matter of the former, I had no real connection to the topic of the latter. In the aftermath of so thoroughly enjoying Empire of Pain, I decided that I would read anything Patrick Radden Keefe wrote, no matter what it was about. That, of course, meant digging into his first book, a look into the practice of human smuggling, specifically of Chinese immigrants into the United States.
The narrative proceeds along two occasionally interconnecting tracks. The book opens with the Golden Venture incident in 1993, in which a ship overloaded with immigrant hopefuls crashed into the shore at Rockaway Beach, leading most of the passengers to jump overboard and try to swim ashore. Ten people drowned, and many others were arrested. It was a major news story which embarrassed the U.S. government, highlighting the many loopholes and oversights in immigration policy, especially in regards to China. Keefe outlines how Chinese immigration has long proved vexing to American authorities, leading to many regrettable shifts in policy over the decades. In the years immediately preceding the Golden Venture crisis, the policy became especially exploitable, as Washington struggled to decide what should qualify a Chinese applicant for asylum in the U.S. The one-child policy and China’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests lead many Chinese citizens to genuinely fear for their life and seek asylum, but they also provided easy, unverifiable excuses for economic migrants, those coming to America strictly to find work and send money back to their families in China.
Radden Keefe’s other focus is on the cottage industry of bringing these hopeful immigrants into the country. for a hefty fee. These “snakeheads,” as they are called, shepherded their clients on a trail that often involved traveling through multiple other countries before attempting to enter the U.S. They provided fake travel documents, including passports, thought most of the hopefuls would destroy the passports mid-journey so they would be harder to deport if caught. The most trusted and notorious of the snakeheads was known as Sister Ping. Having arrived in New York in the 1980s, Sister Ping and her husband opened a store in Chinatown, but quickly turned to the work of human smuggling. Their operation was so lucrative that soon Sister Ping owned homes in countries all around the world.
Sister Ping’s operation flourished for a long time due to indifference from law enforcement, but a series of tragic events, culminating in the Golden Venture crash, raised the public profile on human smuggling and Chinese immigration and increased pressure on government agencies to do something to address the issue. That prompted a years-long effort to build a case against Sister Ping and bring her down.
At the same time, the survivors of the Golden Venture were also having an impact on public sentiment. Falling into a legal gray area, the men wound up being arrested and imprisoned far from their point of entry, in York, Pennsylvania. Though the government pledged to expedite their proceedings, they lingered in prison far longer than anticipated, engendering sympathy in the local population, who rallied to their cause.
Immigration, especially when outside the bounds of the law, has always been a politically charged subject. But Radden Keefe does a good job laying out the facts in a compelling narrative, occasionally letting the reader have a glimpse of his sympathies, but never putting his thumb on the scale. The Snakehead is a panoramic view of the thorny issues that come with trying to establish an immigration policy that is fair, practical, enforceable, and also leaves room for humane treatment and empathy.