Chinese illegals paying $20,000 to cross border

Southern Arizona is seeing a surge in illegal border crossers, not from Mexico, but China.

According to Border Patrol, Chinese immigrants are willing to pay smugglers top dollar, tens of thousand of dollars a piece. International smugglers guide them from The Peoples Republic of China to Mexico and into Arizona.

Recent hot beds for illegal border crossers include Nogales, Ajo, Lukeville and Sasabe.

On average, Mexican nationals pay coyotes up to $3,000 to guide them across the border and into the United States.

Immigrants from the People's Republic of China are charged much, much more.

Mario Escalante with U.S. Border Patrol says, "The smuggling organizations charge anywhere from $20 to $30 thousand."

That's $20 to $30 thousand per immigrant, depending on how they're smuggled in and the quality of their fake documents. It's a lucrative business for international smugglers.

At the Tucson coordination center, between three and four hundred illegal immigrants are processed each day. All are interviewed, fingerprinted, and then bussed to Florence, Arizona to go before a judge.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement if no prior immigration or criminal record, they a plane ticket back to their home country. The average cost is $730 dollars per passenger. But if the immigrant poses a safety risk, they're escorted by ICE agents on the plane. It's all paid for by the U.S. government and your tax dollars.

In the first five months of this fiscal year 969 Chinese immigrants have been apprehended by Border Patrol nationally. Already way ahead of last year's numbers when 836 were arrested. Of those, 30 were removed from Arizona and flown back to China, according to ICE.

Check out fiscal year 2005, broken down by citizenship:

Nationally 2,200 from The People's Republic of China were arrested.

31,000 from Brazil

39,000 from El Salvador

Nearly 53,000 from Honduras and more than 1,000,000 from Mexico.

John Morton with ICE says, "Every indication is that they are coming here through sophisticated criminal networks that are charging these individuals enormous sums of money and holding them in deplorable conditions."

"They're not told they're going thru travel in the desert for four to five days without water," adds Escalante.

Instead, Escalante says naive immigrants put their lives on the line and in the hands of smugglers who promise them new opportunity and a better life.

http://www.kvoa.com/global/story.asp?s=10800572