Reporter Gady Epstein has a story about illegal immigration to China in the July 19 issue of Forbes.
In short, he reports that the tightening labor supply and rising wages in at least certain sectors and places in China is attracting “tens of thousands of illegal aliens” from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma.
According to Epstein, “China has busted several criminal rings this year importing Vietnamese workers. In a publicized crackdown on two networks operating in Guangxi, police caught 369 illegal immigrants who were fanning out across southern China to work. Brokers who bring in these workers can earn $200 a head.”
The illegal immigrants take jobs in sugarcane fields, garment workshops and construction sites. “The jobs pay less than $5 a day, but that’s three times the average wage in Vietnam and perhaps half as much as a Chinese worker could demand.”
Other key quotes from the article:
“They are hard workers and obedient employees,” Zeng Xiangbiao, a shoe factory owner in Dongguan, told a Chinese reporter in a familiar refrain on immigrant labor. He has more than 200 workers from Cambodia and Laos, a quarter of his workforce. “They could work 15 to 16 hours a day and work for a month without any break. Few of the domestic workers, especially those born in the 1980s and after, could take this.”
So far this has risen to the level of a trend but not a crisis. The Chinese labor market can absorb low-paid workers for now, and the Vietnamese labor market doesn’t have enough well-paying jobs. Many border crossers also have Chinese ancestry and can speak Cantonese, the dominant language spoken in Guangdong, helping to smooth the road for them. Moreover, China is not in any imminent danger of having the millions of undocumented migrants that bedevil the U.S. The official numbers of those caught remain in the thousands–the Guangxi border patrol reported catching 1,820 illegal crossers and stopping 4,839 more in 2009, according to state media.
How many thousands more don’t get stopped? Vi Xuan Mai, deputy director of the labor department in the Vietnamese province of Lang Son, tells FORBES that 5,000 workers cross each year from his province, one of six along the Chinese border. “The trend is increasing,” he says, “but we can’t stop it.”
I’ve previously blogged about illegal immigration to China from Africa, Burma, and North Korea.
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