Word: lin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Liverpool is home to the oldest Chinese community in Europe, and locals said at first that they were unaware of Lin 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...
...handful of leaders seem prepared to acknowledge the danger of the immigration racket. As Edward Murphy, the director of a refugee support charity in Liverpool explained, "There are four reasons people don't want to mess with these gangs: your limbs." One survivor of the cockle picker tragedy, Lin Guo, gave evidence from behind a screen in the courtroom as his family in China, who live in the same village as Lin Liang Ren's relatives, had already been threatened and his father beaten. Perhaps Little Lin, on the coast of China, dreaming of a restaurant in Cambridge, is right...
Ocean waves dance around Little Lin's toes before the water is pulled back out by a distant force. That faraway energy is tugging at him, too, drawing him away from this muddy beach in China's eastern Fujian province toward Europe, to a better life he is sure will one day be his. Last year, the 29-year-old 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...
...Little Lin is not alone. Tens of thousands of Chinese from his home province of Fujian alone have traveled from China to Britain in recent years. A coastal region with a booming middle class, Fujian produces a disproportionate number of China's overseas migrants. Back in the mid-1800s, Fujian released its first major wave of migrants, men bound for the Americas to build railroads, can fish and pan for gold. Other coolies, as they were known, headed for European colonies in Asia. Those who left have helped those who stay behind; today, Fujian's annual per-capita income...
...Despite Fujian's relative wealth, many talented youth still don't stick around. Instead, they entrust their lives - and their life savings - to the snakeheads who will shepherd them to new beginnings in the U.S., Japan and, now most of all, Europe. Around 20 people from Little Lin's own hamlet of 300 have left for Europe in the past decade, each one stopping in front of the village's holy banyan tree to ask for protection during the journey...