South Asia

Tashi still vividly remembers the two black Customs and Border Patrol helicopters that marred the blue sky over the Arizona desert that early April morning two years ago. It had been nine days since he left Nepal, a journey that took him by plane to Guatemala, then overland by van and finally on foot to Mexico and the U.S. border. Now it seemed the long journey was about to end.

“I was numb, didn’t know what to do,” he recalled. “ I have never seen anything like this except in movies.” Tashi was exhausted. His blue jeans were covered in desert sand; his shirt reeked of dust and sweat. He carried a bag on his back and a small black briefcase in his right hand. Inside his briefcase were three pairs of shoes, a few clothes and $1,000 in cash. These were all he had brought with him from Nepal.

“This is it,” he thought to himself, as he stared at the helicopters, not knowing what to expect, as they were about to land near where he was. He remembered the risks he took by flying to Guatemala as a tourist, then entering Mexico illegally, and walking three nights in the desert darkness, not knowing where he was headed. “I had done everything I could to get to America and now I just wanted to see what would happen next,” he said.

As a child growing up in a small, remote Himalayan village in the Sagarmatha Zone of northeastern Nepal, Tashi had dreamt of traveling to the West to make his fortune. His parents owned and operated a tourist hotel. The big boots, sunglasses and huge bags that the tourists brought with them had always fascinated him. When he was 15, his father died. “Since then, I wanted to come to America so that I could help my mother back home,” he said. And so there he was, many years later, in the desert near Tuscon, Arizona, with the border patrol closing in.

Tashi’s real name is not used in this report because he fears being investigated by immigration authorities. Now 28, he is one of several thousand South Asian immigrants arrested every year while illegally crossing the U.S. border, according to the Customs and Border Protection Agency. Thousands more are presumed to have crossed the border without getting arrested. It is difficult to say exactly how many South Asians use Guatemala or other countries in Central America as the gateway to the U.S. But there are indicators that the numbers are increasing.

Last May, Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that soon, Indians will account for about one in three of the non-Mexican illegal immigrants apprehended in Texas.

“We are trying to get to the bottom of what's the trafficking route, why are—what's the demand? What is happening there?” she said during the Senate hearing. “We have seen that trend over the last few months. We have devoted some additional resources to that trend, and we're trying to get to the bottom of it.”

Figures from the Customs and Border Protection bear her out. In 2004, border patrol agents apprehended 2,777 Indians illegally crossing to the U.S. from Central America. In 2011, that number grew to 5,953, a nearly 114 percent increase in just seven years. In 2007, 65 Nepalis were arrested at the U.S. border for illegally crossing the border; in 2011, 104 were arrested.

“South Asian smuggling networks usually go either through South America or Europe, both eventually converging in Central America, then up to Guatemala,” said Michael Tutko, Section Chief of Human Smuggling and Trafficking Unit at the Department of Homeland Security. Once the migrants arrive in Mexico, coyotes escort them to the U.S. border, he added.

Interviews with six Nepali immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally via Guatemala in the last five years confirm this. So do interviews with immigration lawyers as well as an examination of 20 court cases filed between 2009 and 2011 against Nepalis and Indians who crossed the border via Guatemala or a neighboring Central American country.

The pipeline that brings South Asians illegally to the United States takes a circuitous route, with Central America playing a key role in the human smuggling trail. This is largely because of “the lack of visa requirements, corrupt government officials and lack of border enforcement,” said Tutko.

Guatemala is an especially favored destination because of the ease of acquiring tourist visa to get there. Five of the six Nepalis migrants contacted for this story said that they had a Guatemalan tourist visa. In addition, the existence of human smuggling networks, lax law enforcement and corrupt immigration officials make it an ideal hub for illegal migrants.

Large-scale corruption is one of the reasons why Guatemala is an ideal breeding ground for human smuggling. In 1995, the U.S. State Department reported that the “staggering level of official corruption” in the country have led to a growth in human smuggling. According to the report, in 1995, the country’s immigration director was fired for accepting bribes from smugglers and handing out visa documents to Chinese smugglers.

The earliest mention of South Asians using Central America as a transit point for illegal immigration to the US was in 1995, when 14 Sikhs were arrested in Highway 8 in Houndras, en route to the Guatemalan border, according to the book, The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown underworld and the American Dream. The situation hasn’t changed much since then, except for the expansion of the smuggling trade to include South Asians. The wave of South Asians hoping to enter the U.S. illegally, said Tutko, has been a boon for whole range of individuals who profit from human smuggling—“from the fake document providers, to corrupt officials, to stash house operators to drivers.”

On a chilly February night two years ago, the phone rang in Tashi’s rented apartment in the Swaymbhu neighborhood of Kathmandu, an area famous for its ancient stupas, mischievous monkeys and monks with red robes and shaved heads. At the other end of the phone was his uncle in New York, who owned a restaurant in Queens and had long known of his nephew’s desire to come to the U.S.

Do you want to come to the U.S. now, his uncle asked. He would fund the trip, he said, and it would cost $10,000 to come via Guatemala. His uncle assured him the trip would be safe because the person arranging it was his friend and co-worker at the restaurant. And, he added, take your cousin Pukar with you.

Pukar’ s story and personality are in stark contrast to Tashi’s. Pukar has a bachelor’s degree from the Himalayan WhiteHouse International College, one of the prestigious private institutions based in Kathmandu, where he was then enrolled in an MBA program.

After finishing high school, he tried to get a student or F-1 visa from the U.S. embassy in Kathmandu but was rejected. The State Department says that the U.S Embassy in Nepal issued 3,401 student visas to Nepalis students in 2006; in 2010, only less than half that number was issued. This has created anxiety among Nepali students like Pukar, prompting some of them to either seek opportunities elsewhere or find different ways to enter the U.S.

A student visa was not an option for Tashi because he had taken a break from his studies in 2004 when he was still a junior in high school and went to Norway to work as a waiter and dishwasher.

His initial plan was to return to Nepal from Norway after four months but he changed his mind. “I like having money so when I started to earn it, I didn’t want to go back to school,” he said. So for the next three years, Tashi spent six months of every year working in Norway and the rest of the year with his family and friends. By then he had a girlfriend, whom he had met when he was still in high school. He married her in 2009. Like many Nepalis youths, Tashi wanted a better life than he had in Nepal. With his uncle covering the cost of the trip, he had no reason to stay home.

Mexico’s National Immigration Institute (INM) estimates that 150,000 individuals cross the U.S border illegally every year. The cost of coming to the U.S. depends on where an immigrant begins the journey. On average, a Mexican pays between $1,000 and $3,000 to coyotes to be escorted across the U.S. border, said Tutko.

South Asians often pay ten times more because of other expenses, such as travel documents and airfare. Indian migrants are typically charged somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000, said a Texas based immigration lawyer who has represented Indian nationals arrested for illegally crossing the U.S. border. (The lawyer requested anonymity because the nonprofit she worked for didn’t give her permission to be named in this report.)

Travel documents account for a significant chunk of the expenses and their cost can depend on how authentic the documents are. Some documents are faked, and prices can depend on how real they look. Documents alone can cost anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000, Tutko said. “These documents can sometimes get them as far as Mexico, sometimes even flying them into Mexico City directly.”

Four of the six Nepali migrants interviewed for this story said that they spent at least $20,000 to come to America. Like Tashi, Rabin was introduced to smugglers through his family’s network. “One of my relatives knew someone who would help me come to the U.S.,” he said. He described Nepali smugglers as “everyday people” who operated travel agencies and had contacts in Singapore, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Guatemala. He shelled out more than $25,000 to enter the U.S. via Guatemala in early 2008. About $11,000 of this went to acquiring travel documents. Now in his early 50s, Rabin, who hails from Dang in Midwestern Nepal, said a Nepali smuggler had told him in 2005 that it would cost him only $10,000 to enter the U.S. via Central America. “I was duped,” he said while sipping a glass of warm tea in an almost empty Indian restaurant during a snowy afternoon in Queens.

In late 2005, Rabin left for Singapore on the instruction of a smuggler who promised to arrange documents that would allow him to fly to Ecuador. “I lived in Singapore for a month, then I had to fly to Malaysia,” he recalled. Nepalis do not need a visa to enter Singapore but they can only stay a month at a time.

Because the smuggler’s contacts in Singapore were unable to arrange immediately for his travel to Ecuador, Rabin had to stay there longer that he thought. He ended up spending seven months shuttling between Singapore and Malaysia. During that time, the smuggler’s Singaporean contacts routinely asked Rabin for money, each time assuring him that those funds would be used to get him a tourist visa to Ecuador.

He never got his visa. Tired and frustrated, he returned to Kathmandu. But the experience left him feeling trapped by smugglers who used different tactics to get more money out of him.

A year and half later, the Nepali smuggler called Rabin to tell him to try again. This time, he was assured, there won't be a problem. In 2007, he flew to Singapore and then to Costa Rica. With the help of local coyotes he travelled to Mexico. And finally, he entered Texas through the Mexican border.

Tashi remembers talking with his wife after his uncle had made him the offer to come to the U.S. He would need to leave, he said, but assured her he would return soon. Street dogs barked outside his rented apartment in Swaymbhu. His wife, Likpi, a nurse, did not have much to say.

The next day, Tashi met with Pukar to discuss his uncle’s offer. Bursting with excitement and anticipation of adventure, Tashi researched YouTube videos on migrants who had gone to the U.S. by way of Mexico.

By Nepali standards, both Tashi and Pukar are middle class, with a standard of living better than most of their countrymen, a third of whom live below the poverty line. Still, both of them decided to take their chances to go to the U.S. so they could make more money. Like a lot of young people in Nepal who are relatively wealthy and with good education, they were hungry for opportunities overseas that were not available to them in their homeland. Pukar hoped to attend a graduate school in the U.S. and find a job while Tashi hoped to make money by finding work in a restaurant or grocery store with his uncle’s help.

A 2011 World Bank report said that there were close to 10 million Nepalis overseas. Most of them are in the Gulf countries and only one percent of Nepali migrants came to North America in 2010, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington D.C. that analyzes global population movements.

The World Bank lists Nepal as one of the top five labor-exporting countries in the world, with remittances from overseas workers accounting for 23 percent of its GDP. In a 2005 essay for the Migration Policy Institute, University of East Anglia professor David Seddon wrote that most rural households in Nepal now have at least one family member away from home or abroad who serves as the main breadwinner. “Working in a foreign nation is like part of our culture,” said Tashi.

“People continue to have this vision of the U.S. as a land of opportunity and are willing to go through whatever it takes to go to the U.S.,” said Dr. Bandita Sijapati, a researcher at the Social Science Baha, a nonprofit organization based in Kathmandu. Nepalis who migrate to the U.S. believe that “the long work hours, bad working conditions are only temporary and that one day, they will be able to make a decent living there,” Sijpati said in an email.

In a small apartment in a quiet and clean neighborhood in Baltimore, five Nepali migrants are living exactly the life that Sijpati described. All of them came to the U.S. illegally via Guatemala and other countries in Central America.

One weekend in March, with the help of New York-based Rabin, this reporter was introduced to them as a friend researching the various methods Nepalis use to get to the U.S. Because they are in the country illegally, their real names are concealed in this article.

All four live in a sparsely furnished, two-room apartment that smelled of chicken curry. They have a living room with a couch, an 18-inch Sanyo TV set, a dining table and three wooden chairs. There are two bedrooms, each with two beds.

Kamal, a bald man with wrinkles around his eyes is in his late 50s. Before coming to the U.S., he had lived in Japan for nine years and in South Korea for four. Interviewed on a Saturday night, he had just returned home after working 12 hours in a pizza parlor owned by one of his relatives. He receives $600 every week for working 12 hours a day with just one day off. He gets paid $10 per hour for 60 hours, not the 72 he actually puts in. Without proper documents and no connections, he does not have an option to work anywhere else. For most of the week, he is on his feet, sweating inside a pizza store chopping tomatoes and onions or cooking pizzas.

“I will not want anyone to come to the U.S.,” he said. He earns barely enough to pay the rent and send a few hundred dollars a month to his family back home. He has no life outside of work, and as that cold night wore on, he said he regretted his decision to come to the U.S. Exhausted after a long day at work, he went to bed early, as he had to be at work the next morning.

At 8:30 a.m., the sun crept into the apartment through the cracks left by ill-fitting curtains. Everyone stirred and got ready for work. Kamal prepared tea as he talked about how he had once thought that America was a place where one can live comfortably and make money easily. On the dot, at 9 a.m., a car stopped and honked in front of the apartment. Kamal rushed out of the door.

In 2009, Kamal had called Rabin asking for help to come to the U.S. The next year, Rabin put him in touch with the smuggler who had brought him here. Like Rabin, Kamal went via Guatemala, where he met a Nepali man in his 30s who serves as a facilitator between Central American coyotes and Nepali smugglers. Kamal said he also spent close to $25,000 for the entire trip, including the cost for documents.

Like Kamal, Paras works with other Nepalis at a pizza parlor in Baltimore. He is a shy man in his early 20s from the Nepali city of Pokhara and came to the U.S. through Guatemala in late 2010. That morning, he was wearing a cap, white shirt, black jeans and black shoes. As he cooked pepperoni pizza for the customer waiting at the counter, he recalled his experience meeting a smuggler in Nepal. “When I saw him for the first time, I could not believe he would be able to send me to the U.S.,” he said, referring to the average-looking man, a local smuggler who lived with his family in one of the neighhorhoods of Pokhara.

Paras’s family is relatively well off in Nepal and they spent almost $25,000 to help him come to the U.S. When he left for Singapore, his family deposited $7,000 to the smuggler’s bank account in Pokhara.

When South Asians come to the U.S., their passage is usually arranged through a middleman. This was true in Tashi’s case. His uncle told him that his travel was going to be arranged by a Mexican friend in New York, who would also organize his trip via Guatemala to the U.S. Tutko, the chief investigative officer for the DHS’s Human Smuggling and Trafficking Unit, refers to these middlemen and others who do the various tasks that make up the human smuggling chain as “facilitators.”

“Facilitators can be anyone who provides a service as part of the smuggling venture,” he said, adding that they can be document providers, stash house operators, van drivers or corrupt government officials.

Unlike drug trafficking cartel networks, which have a clear hierarchy, human smuggling networks are loosely organized, “which makes our job even tougher,” he said.

Tutko talked about a Mexican family that lived on both sides of the border near San Diego and recruited Mexicans who wanted to come to the U.S. The family charged somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000 per person. They had a trove of fake and stolen identification documents ranging from the U.S. passports to driver’s licenses to border crossing cards that they provided to their clients so they could cross the border into the U.S.

The family, said Tutko, had a beauty salon on the Mexican side where they brought their clients and did up hair and makeup to ensure they looked like the photos in the identification cards. Once the clients crossed the border, the smuggler’s relatives on the American side would keep them in their home until they collected the money that was agreed upon. After receiving the payment, they would then put their clients on the bus headed to their previously arranged destination in the U.S.

Tutko said that the DHS investigation located over $600,000 in wire transfers and $3 million in real property that the family of the smuggler had purchased with proceeds from their criminal activity. They had no other legitimate source of income and admitted to smuggling three to 10 aliens per week over a 20-year period. “The mother and father were sentenced to prison and will be deported to Mexico upon completion of their sentences,” said Tutko. “The children got time served.”

There are many small networks of similar nature, said Tutko. Middlemen who provide services as part of the smuggling venture can be anywhere.

After consulting with his uncle and a few close friends in Nepal, Tashi and his cousin both decided to plan the trip to Guatemala. Tashi spent $200 to get a new passport, which he then mailed to his uncle in New York. His uncle then sent the passport to Guatemala.

Two months later, Tashi and his cousin received their passports stamped with Guatemalan tourist visas. They bought plane tickets, and on April 18, 2010, they took Qatar Airways from Tribhuwan International Airport in Kathmandu to Doha and from there flew on an Air Arabia plane to Madrid. There, they took another plane to Guatemala. The entire journey took 36 hours.

They landed at La Aurora International Airport in Antigua at about 5 p.m. As they walked to the Customs agent at the airport, they were asked by an immigration officer to follow him to a small room with a window. Once there, Tashi told the officer that they were in Guatemala to visit Moncho. This was the code he had been instructed to say. With that, they got a stamp on their passports and were allowed to head to the luggage checkout area.

Outside the airport, Moncho was waiting for them. He was a small man, about five feet, four inches tall. He was in his early 30s and was dressed casually in T-shirt and jeans.

Tashi said that Moncho was with two other men who did not speak English. They had a van and a cab that they used to drive directly into the basement of the hotel where the cousins were supposed to stay. Tashi remembers that the hotel was located in a residential area with wide roads. It had large rooms and was well furnished. That night, they ate fried chicken and rice after Moncho advised them to eat a lot and rest well because soon they all would need to walk tirelessly in the desert to cross the border.

On the third morning in Guatemala, Tashi and his cousin left for what Moncho described to them as his hometown, a five-hour drive from Antigua. They spent the night at a hotel there. After eating lunch the next day, they returned in an SUV to Antigua, where they stayed in a different hotel to avoid being spotted.

“You know you would not expect to live in a fancy hotel when you are trying to enter a country illegally,” said Tashi. “The hotel had a swimming pool and sand volleyball court.” After staying a night in that hotel, they embarked on a journey to the Mexican border.

Tashi and Pukar were made to sit in the trunk for the entire ten hours it took to drive to the border between Guatemala and Mexico. Moncho had assured them neither police nor immigration officials would stop them. When they had crossed the border, they rested for a few hours in what Tashi described as a small town. There, a large truck picked them up along with six other migrants who were from Honduras and Guatemala and drove them to Mexico City.

“I felt like I was so close to the U.S and there was no reason for me to be tired,” he recalled. Early the next morning, they were driven to another city that Tashi could not name. They left the truck for an SUV and then headed to what he described as a small village.

Tashi recalled seeing many other groups like his own in the village—he guessed that there were about 200 people waiting to cross the border in Agua Prieta, a municipality in Sonora, the northeastern state of Mexico. That night, all of the migrants were told to walk in a straight line. He said that everyone was mostly quiet except when they stopped to rest. Juice and snacks came in handy during the break. In the morning, they rested in what looked like a campsite with tents. Moncho told them those who had previously used the route to enter the US had put up the tents. The following night, they walked in the dark again. As day broke after the third night of walking, Tashi saw Border Patrol officers. They were now very close to Tuscon.

As they came close to the border, Tashi and his cousin hid in the bushes. That’s when they saw the helicopters in the sky. They landed nearby and Tashi watched silently as the border patrol officers came down from the helicopter using ropes. He remembered standing there numb, unable to move.

He saw two other migrants running, hoping to escape the officers. His cousin was cowering in the bushes. The officers quickly arrested everyone, including him. Tashi recalled feeling relief as they were escorted to the van. He was finally no longer under the hot desert sun, but in the shade. He told the officers that he was from Nepal and had to leave the country because Maoist insurgents had threatened to kill him.

Tashi and Pukar were placed in a detention facility in Tucson for a week. Then they were taken to an immigration detention center in Florence, where they stayed for 28 days. “Living in the detention center was not that bad,” said Tashi. Immigration officers in Florence interviewed Tashi about his background and his motivation to come to the U.S. Since he wasn’t fluent in English, a translator helped him answer questions. Tashi knew what to expect and had already prepared his answers. Moncho had coached him well. Later, he was allowed to call his uncle in New York.

When the migrants arrive at the U.S border and make an asylum claim, they are either detained or released on parole pending a “credible fear” interview, said Tutko. If a migrant can convince the officers that there is “credible fear of persecution” if they were deported to their homeland, they are allowed to file for asylum. Tashi and his cousin successfully convinced the officers that their life would be under threat if they were deported.

After paying $2,000 each as a bond to the Customs and Border Protection, they were allowed to leave the immigration facility. With the help of the lawyer his uncle had hired, they applied for asylum. Then they took the bus to New York.

All the other Nepali migrants interviewed for this story had also filed for asylum. Over the years, the number of Nepalis filing for asylum has increased significantly, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 2002, there were only 111 applications for asylum involving Nepalis. In 2010, the number jumped to 755, an almost 580 percent increase in just eight years.

Once in New York, Tashi and Pukar found jobs with their uncle’s help. “I earn $500 per week,” Tashi said as he sipped a Heineken in a restaurant in Queens that had Bollywood music playing in the background. He glanced at a gaggle of girls sitting across the table and said, “You know... I was always fascinated by the Western world.”

After a 72-hour workweek as a waiter and dishwasher in Chinatown, Tashi usually retreats to a bar in Jackson Heights with other Nepali migrants. There he enjoys beer and a plate of Momo, Nepali dumplings. Six days a week, he wakes up every morning around 9 a.m. to prepare himself for an hour long commute from Woodside, Queens to the Chinatown restaurant where he is on his feet for 12 hours, serving food to customers, helping cooks, washing dishes or mopping floors. It’s a lifestyle that is in contrast with his comfortable life in Nepal. Yet, he believes life in New York is better than Nepal.

“I love Sundays because I can relax and Skype with my wife and see my daughter,” he said. When he left Nepal in April 2010, his wife was three month pregnant. Now, his daughter is 17 months old.

He hopes to bring his wife and daughter here once his asylum application is approved. Right now, he is happy that he is able to help his wife and mother financially by sending them $800 every month.

As he sat in that restaurant, relaxed in his blue jacket with white straps and blue jeans, he looked like thousands of other Nepalis who come to the U.S either as students or as recipients of the U.S Diversity Visa. Like hundreds and thousands of many other migrants without proper documents in the U.S., he seems to have found his place in the underground economy.

Asked what he plans to do if his asylum gets rejected, he said, “I will stay here.”

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