Dressed in their best traveling suits and chattering in Chinese, the three women walking through Chinatown early last week blended in with the merchants, schoolchildren and mothers in the neighborhood. Their faces revealed none of the terrors that drove them to flee their native China or the hardship they have endured since seeking refuge on American soil.
Over lunch at a restaurant called King Wah, the women savored the familiar if long-missed seasonings of Chinese cuisine and talked about how they came to join a growing number of Chinese seeking asylum in the U.S. because of a newly defined form of human-rights violation: reproductive persecution.
Their stories, told through a translator after they were released by the Chicago office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, highlight a little-publicized provision of the 1996 immigration-reform legislation that expanded the definition of a refugee to those who have suffered from a country’s restrictive policies on childbearing.
For Feng Liau, who with the others had been detained since May after landing at O’Hare International Airport with a fraudulent passport, that meant being arrested after giving birth in secret and being taken to a hospital where she was sterilized against her will.
For Chung-Chen Gao, it meant a forced abortion and no hope of having another child legally if she remained in China.
For Na Lin, the illegal third child born into her family, it has meant living as a non-person in the eyes of the Chinese government.
Before arriving in Chicago, the women say they spent as long as three years in Spain, where they met while living and working as seamstresses in a sweatshop. They hoped to buy safe passage to the United States but instead found themselves victims of an all-too-common immigration scam. They said they paid $20,000 each to a smuggler who gave them fake Japanese passports and put them on a plane to Chicago, where they were met by immigration officials and detained.
The women have applied for political asylum in the United States under a provision of the sweeping 1996 immigration reform legislation. The change, initiated by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who is chair of the House pro-life caucus, expanded the definition of a refugee to include people forced to abort a pregnancy or undergo involuntary sterilization, or who have been persecuted for resistance to coercive population control programs.
Liau, Gao and Lin have passed their first hurdle with immigration authorities–convincing INS agents they have a “credible fear” of persecution if they are returned to China, according to Lynne Hans, an attorney with Asian Human Services in Chicago, which took their case pro bono. The women were released to his custody before flying to New York, where he said each has a friend or relative willing to assist until their asylum applications are considered.
INS officials confirmed that the women were released from federal custody Monday but would not comment on the particulars of their case.
They are among a small number of people who have applied for asylum under the provision. Only 21 people in the INS’ Chicago District have applied for this type of asylum in the past fiscal year, said INS spokeswoman Marilu Cabrera. Of that number, the INS recommended that 13 receive asylum. Nationwide, 1,525 Chinese women and their husbands have applied for this type of asylum and 322 of them received INS approval. Asylum is available to only 1,000 Chinese per year.
Shen Shishun, press consul for the consulate general of the People’s Republic of China in Chicago, denied that the Chinese government sanctions forced abortions or sterilizations. He conceded, however, that some local government authorities might take China’s “family-controlling policy” too far. “If we find local authorities are doing it, they will be punished,” he maintained.
He criticized the United States for using its immigration policy to “encourage people to seek asylum for that reason. We think our family planning policy is a must.”
Added Consul Lin Chongfei: “I hope the U.S. will accept more people from China with three children. Then they won’t have to seek asylum. They can come freely.”
Those who do apply for asylum are granted an interview with INS officials within 43 days. The officials determine if they have a credible claim, and then forward their fingerprints to the FBI for a background check, a process that takes an additional three to four months.
If a case is denied by the INS, the applicant can go before an immigration judge, who will decide whether their case is valid.
“Some people have ridiculous claims, like a 12-year-old kid who wants to have a family or a 65-year-old woman,” said Cabrera.
Those who apply for asylum must convince the INS official they are telling the truth, Cabrera said. Having proof or documentation of an abortion or sterilization would bolster a case, she said.
“It’s pretty much about believability or credibility,” Cabrera said.
Such asylum cases can be extremely difficult to prove, one China expert said.
“There is no way to tell which of the cases are legitimate ones and which ones are embellished or fabricated,” said Susan Greenhalgh, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine. An expert and critic of China’s population policy, Greenhalgh often is consulted by the INS for input on the legitimacy of these cases.
While legislators hoped the change in immigration laws would pressure China to reconsider its coercive family planning policies, this law won’t have much impact, Greenhalgh said.
“China is probably happy to have some way of ridding itself of all these people,” she said.
China’s reproductive policies were the focus of a congressional hearing in June called to highlight China’s human rights abuses in advance of President Clinton’s trip to China.
A Chinese defector testified that she oversaw forced sterilizations, night-time raids on the homes of pregnant women and forced abortions as late as nine months into pregnancy.
China is a country with more than 1.2 billion inhabitants, more than one-fifth of the world’s population, and 21 million more babies are born each year.
China requires women to seek a government permit before becoming pregnant. The government prohibits forced abortions, but poor supervision of local officials who are under pressure to meet family planning goals can result in abortion and sterilization, according to a 1997 U.S. State Department report.
Liau says it happened to her.
According to her account, she already had a son, so she was not eligible to receive another pregnancy permit. When she got pregnant anyway, Liau said, she was arrested, taken to a hospital and the baby was aborted.
Then, she said, government agents decreed that she be fitted with an intrauterine device and submit to monthly checks to ensure that the IUD was in place. Despite the IUD, Liau said, she became pregnant a third time and hid in the country until she delivered the baby.
Although she asked a friend to get papers for the second child, the authorities discovered her ruse and ordered that she be sterilized. When Liau refused, she was once again arrested, taken to a hospital and sterilized against her will.
Lin, 24, is the third child in her family, which means she is not considered a person in China, and is denied many of the rights of other Chinese citizens. That legal reality led her to escape the country by walking to Cambodia, where she eventually found passage to Spain and work in the sweatshop.
Gao, 32, already the mother of a young son, was arrested when she became pregnant a second time without a permit. The pregnancy was aborted. Soon after, her husband abandoned her. Since she already had a son, the Chinese government would not have issued her a permit for another child, even by a different husband, effectively dashing any hope of ever remarrying, Gao said. It was that realization, she said, that made her leave her son with relatives, a loss that she said was too painful to talk about with strangers.
Shortly after the law changed, Craig B. Mousin, who teaches immigration and refugee law at the DePaul University College of Law, represented a Chinese couple who came to the U.S. as academics. They had a second child in the U.S. and a third child is on the way. If forced to return home, they feared she would have to abort the pregnancy, said Mousin, who helped them obtain asylum.
This couple, like Liau and Gao, left children behind in China. While it may be hard for Americans to understand why women who flouted the law to have children would then leave them behind, Greenhalgh said it is not unusual in Chinese culture for children to be raised by relatives. Moreover, Hans, the attorney for Asian Human Services, said that the women who violated the law might suffer government persecution for the rest of their lives.
Indeed, Liau said she was banished to the countryside to work in the rice fields, a punishment that led her 15-year-old son to urge her to flee China.
“My son encouraged me to go. I had no future in a rice field,” Liau said.
