Word: czechs
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...first thing the snakehead wants to say is that he isn't some slave driver or gangster. He is, he says, a respectable businessman from Fujian's interior who settled in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s and started a textile import company. That was just after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and it was easy for an enterprising Fujianese to sell cheap cloth to 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...
...clearly, holding the document gives him power over his clients. From Russia, the Fujianese cross the forested and poorly patrolled Ukrainian and Slovakian borders by foot at night. Then they are stuffed into a minivan - with up to 12 Chinese crouched in the back - for the trip into the Czech Republic...
...Passage through Eastern Europe is secured by Ukrainian and Vietnamese gangsters. "These routes used to be for drugs and weapons," says the snakehead, who does not accompany his clients on their journey. "Now they're for Chinese people, too." On average, the snakehead can sneak three people through the Czech Republic a month, but he says a network of traffickers from Sanming brings in a total of 1,400 Fujianese a year, in addition to 600 others from Zhejiang, another coastal Chinese province. "It's a good business, more lucrative than textiles," he says. "But if the people get caught...
...From the Czech Republic into Germany and beyond - the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Britain - the migrants are switched from minivans to sedans. The Dover disaster alerted police to bigger vehicles, says the snakehead, so it's wise to opt for small cars. The drivers he uses are German, and not a single one, he says, has ever been stopped. The journey takes about two months door-to-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...
...says his journey was easy. First, he took an economy-class flight to Prague - Big Lin's sister already lived in the Czech Republic, where she ran an import-export clothing company. She pulled the right strings and procured him a business visa. Then, all Big Lin had to do was invest $10,000 in a Prague business venture. It's not clear who pocketed that money, but less than six months later, Big Lin says he received a Czech residence permit. The Czech document enabled him to get a tourist visa to England, which he overstayed. Six years...