Chinese Human Smuggling Organizations: Families, Social Networks, and Cultural Imperatives (review)

Chinese Human Smuggling Organizations: Families, Social Networks, and Cultural Imperatives by Sheldon X. Zhang provides a rare glimpse into the lives of human smugglers who are commonly referred to as "snakeheads." Zhang's book details how snakeheads use a complex transnational web of actors in as many as 51 countries to smuggle Chinese immigrants into the United States. Zhang's daring book based on 129 face-to-face interviews in New York, Los Angeles and Fuzhou outlines the structure of human smuggling organizations. Human smuggling is illegal, and therefore details about the industry are mostly speculative, but this study delicately exposes the structure of this illicit business.

The beauty of the book is that it tackles an issue normally difficult to broach. Typically, people who participate in criminal activity that can lead to imprisonment refrain from discussing their behavior. However, the author was able to interview current and former snakeheads about their smuggling organizations. These interviews provide rich detail about human smuggling such as how snakeheads enter the industry, the smuggling process, the social networks used by snakeheads, organized crime's involvement with human smuggling, and how gender affects smuggling. Although the book is a major contribution to the literature on human smuggling and should be lauded for uncovering this hidden behavior, one shortcoming is that the topic precludes a random sample of snakeheads.

Zhang introduces the dyadic cartwheel network as a description of how human smuggling occurs. This smuggling process is highly specialized where each actor performs a specific task and has little knowledge of other participating snakeheads' actions. Successful operations depend on the success of each entrepreneur, but no one controls or understands the whole process. Snakeheads only interact in dyads and even though the whole process may involve many actors, no snakehead knows all participants. This structure has many benefits. Individual participants are equally dependent on each other for a successful operation, providing each snakehead power to negotiate compensation. Such entrepreneurs are able to rapidly adjust to change. The process also acts as a safeguard against detection, as no actor appears to know the roles of all the actors. If an actor is detected, he or she may be arrested without involving other actors, who are strangers to the detained snakehead. Given the severity of the consequences associated with detection, this structure provides some measure of protection to snakeheads.

The book successfully tackles many common misconceptions about the Chinese smuggling industry, such as the belief that it is controlled by large criminal organizations. The data from the interviews shows that snakeheads are entrepreneurial individuals who work with others to smuggle Chinese immigrants into the United States for a profit. Each snakehead is responsible for a specific task, but he is not controlled by a larger organization. Rather, he accomplishes a task such as moving migrants to intermediary countries, arranging fraudulent marriages, collecting unpaid debt, or escorting and controlling immigrants. According to Zhang, if one actor is removed from the process, the operation often ceases to exist. Such a vulnerable process is indicative of groups of individuals working together to accomplish a common goal for profit. Zhang suggests that human smuggling is not stable and perhaps too unpredictable for criminal organizations. It is perhaps the great uncertainty associated with human smuggling that dictates the need for individual entrepreneurs to fulfill the role of snakeheads.

The author reports an interesting finding that parallels the experiences of undocumented Mexican migration, and that is the continuity of undocumented Chinese migration. Many undocumented Chinese immigrants are able to enter the United States without being detected by immigration authorities despite the significant resources dedicated to border enforcement by the federal government. Penalties for snakeheads convicted of human smuggling have greatly increased. In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which made the penalty for smuggling undocumented immigrants as much as 10 years imprisonment. However, the flow of undocumented Chinese migration has not stopped; approximately 100,000 undocumented...