JOURNEY TO THE GOLDEN MOUNTAIN
They come by plane, by boat, by shipping container: Chinese immigrants, smuggled into New York by a thriving underground network. Every year, thousands still risk border patrols, vicious "snakeheads" and criminal kingpins, to seek their fortune on the streets of the city. > By Amy Zimmer

City Limits MAGAZINE
January 2004

He lives in Chinatown and wears a white t-shirt draping down to the knees of his baggy jeans. But Kevin, who's 13, still remembers vividly one particular moment when he was a toddler in Fuzhou. His father bought him a dog, then left for New York.
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Migrants rarely find jobs outside of the restaurant, garment and construction industries--fields that are presently suffering. Kwong observes that U.S. employers who hire Fuzhounese for sub-minimum wages are a critical link in keeping the smuggling system going--without those jobs, migrants would have no way of paying back the smuggling fees. "Because of the pressure of having to pay the debts back as soon as possible, they are willing to get low pay and much more willing to tolerate abusive conditions," he says. As Fuzhounese migration has risen over the past decade, wages in these industries have fallen. Indeed, Fuzhounese have effectively displaced many Cantonese workers from the Chinatown labor market, pushing them to seek work elsewhere. At the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, 25 percent of the workers are now Chinese, most of them Cantonese