Chinese migrate toward opportunity

While China's much-publicized economic boom has improved the lives of many, it has also widened the gap between rich and poor, driving a wave of migration.

Most of the migrants head to more prosperous urban centers of China, where average incomes are four times as high as rural incomes.

The small number who are smuggled overseas are not usually the poorest of China's poor, said University of Washington geography professor Kam Wing Chan, an expert on Chinese migration.

Those who try to migrate overseas typically have more resources. They are able to borrow money to pay the huge sums to a middleman. It's an example of "relative deprivation" — a feeling among the less well-off in the rich coastal areas of being poor, compared with the very wealthy, Chan said.

"It's the gap between what their situation is and what their expectations are, and those expectations are informed by what they see elsewhere, in urban areas of China and now exposure to Western life," said Tim Hanstad, director of the Rural Development Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit group.

The Seattle area has seen a steady flow of Chinese immigrants over the years. Those who come to the attention of social-service agencies have had trouble finding jobs.

China's economic transformation places a premium on education and information-technology skills, so people who lack them are hard pressed to find meaningful work, said Carina del Rosario, communications coordinator at the Asian Counseling and Referral Service in Seattle.

"They share similar desires as anyone who has come to this country," del Rosario said. "If they aren't able to realize their dream in their home country, they'll take whatever means they can find."

A worker earning minimum wage in Washington state makes 16 times as much as a worker in Shenzhen, the city with the highest monthly minimum wage in China (about $73 a month). Yet that statistic belies the often bleak reality for those smuggled in illegally.

Snakeheads, those who run illegal overseas smuggling operations, give very misleading information about life in the United States, comparing the hourly wage in the U.S. with that in China without talking about the standard of living.

"Often it's the most successful story of migrants being told back home, but only those that do well can go home and build new homes," Chan said. "Those that can't survive disappear or die. Their story is never told."