IMMIGRATION: A Case of Togetherness

In San Francisco's teeming Chinatown (pop. about 30,000), the man most hated last week was one Huey Bing Dai. The wrinkled man of 80 had not shown his solemn face in the streets for weeks, for thanks to his help the Justice Department had cracked one of the biggest cases of illegal immigration in its history. After a seven-month investigation federal authorities reported that Huey Bing Dai's clan had secretly and illegally moved most of the male inhabitants of an entire Chinese village to the U.S. over a period of 50-odd years. Like untold thousands of other Chinese in the U.S., the Hueys did it by playing a game as intricate and baffling as any Chinese puzzle ever devised: the slot racket.

Bent Twigs. The racket required only money and patience. A Chinese in the U.S. would revisit the home country, say for a year, perhaps longer. Upon his return he would inform immigration officials that his wife, still in China, had borne him a child, maybe two or three. Since the self-styled father could claim that he was a U.S. citizen, his child, accordingly, was a citizen and was so registered.

Years went by. Having established a slot or two—or more—on his family tree, the man then arranged with Chinese brokers in such places as Hong Kong to sell his slots to willing Chinese for prices ranging from $2,500 apiece to $6,000. The broker found on his lists a Chinese whose age approximated that of a registered son, sent him on to the U.S. Once there, the newcomer often became virtually an indentured servant until he paid for his slot, frequently was harassed by extortionists and informers who threatened to expose his illegal entry unless he paid blackmail.

Dirty Wash. The racket worked for decades in such points of entry as New York and Boston. But it flourished best in San Francisco, where noncitizens, when pressed to prove U.S. citizenship,* could insist that their birth certificates and other papers had been lost in the great earthquake of 1906. Old Huey Bing Dai, haled before federal authorities on an anonymous tip, confessed that he alone was responsible for 57 such fraudulent entries into the U.S. Along with others, he had arranged slots for more than 250 men of his clan who had lived in the Cantonese village of Sai Kay; most of them became laundrymen in San Francisco.

When the news of his confession spread through Chinatown, the elders of the Huey clan sensed the crisis, met in a laundry on Leavenworth Street, decided to parade into Assistant U.S. Attorney James B. Schnake's office and ask for mercy.

After hearing the stories from the clan, the feds estimated that a good 50% of San Francisco's Chinatown are illegal residents; they hope they will be able to halt the flow by fining and jailing Chinese who deal directly in slot contacts, in the past year and a half have prosecuted 69. The U.S. probably will not prosecute the others, since deporting them would be impracticable. But all this did not ease the situation of old Huey Bing Dai, who gave everything away. "The whole town's mad at him," said a young Chinese-American. "He will not be happy here."