High-risk Hide And Seek
The Age
Saturday April 17, 1999
BEACHED boats and ``wetback" round-ups in the coastal scrub capture the popular imagination, but coming by boat is no longer the conduit of choice for illegal entry to Australia.
Not by sea, but by air - that's the way the sophisticated illegal immigrant attempts to beat the system, a method that increased by 30 per cent last year, and topped by Chinese. Increasingly, people-smuggling rackets have begun to swell the numbers and replace many of the individual arrangements people made to bypass Australian authorities.
Boat arrivals peaked at 1000 in 18 boats in 1994-95, but dwindled to just 159 last year, compared with 1555 people refused entry at airports. Detection figures are only the minimum of an estimated much larger but unknown total.
More and more the front line against illegals is not so much the coastwatch service but Department of Immigration officials placed at airports overseas, alert to suspicious actions and bogus documentation of people boarding planes bound for Australia.
Backing them up are a bunch of boffins in the Immigration Department's backrooms who identify false or misleading documents like passports.
This was the way the most recently discovered racket, organised by Iraqis, was brought undone by a joint Immigration Department and Federal Police operation.
Sharp-eyed officers posted at Bangkok noticed a group of five men exchanging boarding passes just before their flight. By linking passenger and booking records with airline inspector records, the organisers of the ring were linked to the arrival of a number of Iraqis who had entered Australia on false passports.
Charges were laid soon after searches of the suspects' homes yielded a number of stolen photo-substituted passports, falsified Iraqi identity documents and false Australian visas. Nine people were ultimately convicted and several jailed.
The Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, said people, mostly relatives of the organisers, had paid up to $15,500 for the false documents.
But the upshot of its discovery was that between 1 January 1997 and 19 June last year, 183 Iraqi nationals had been refused entry because of the false documents, and another 154 illegal Iraqi arrivals were intercepted in the following six months.
The Iraqis formed a significant proportion of those refused entry at airports in 1997-98, half of whom were carrying false documents and more than three-quarters of them believed to have had documents arranged by traffickers.
Ruddock says other rackets have been uncovered involving Chinese nationals travelling on stolen Taiwanese passports, and another involving Korean deaf mutes who were caught begging and selling key rings in Adelaide and on the Gold Coast.
The Immigration Department estimates that four million people are smuggled around the world each year. People involved in organised rackets take enormous trouble to conceal their route and the organisation behind them. This usually involves destroying the documents en route or recycling them. Those coming to Australia usually disguise their origins by travelling on indirect routes, often through southern Asia (Bangkok is a favorite), where they pay agents to arrange their travel documents.
The department's deputy director, Mark Sullivan, believes Australia is not at the high end of people-smuggling, with people paying up to $50,000 to get into America.
Australia: A port of choice for people smugglers Top 10 source countries 1997/98 China 268 Iraq 140 Indonesia 132 Sri Lanka 118 Somalia 78 Thailand 77 Kuwait 61 New Zealand 59 South Korea 59 Algeria 51 Other 519 Total 1555 Air route and Sea route Middle East, Beiging, Seoul, Tokyo, Vietiane, Beihai, Hanoi, Bangkok, Singapore, Kupang, Denpasar to Sydney Sourth Africa to Perth Source: Department of Immigration
© 1999 The Age