Minyao Wang, Thirty Years After the Golden Venture
Thirty years ago this morning, the Golden Venture struck a sandbar off the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. The rusty vessel carried almost 300 immigrants from China. Each would-be migrant paid about $40,000 for the hazardous journey. Most departed China on foot, cut through the jungles of Myanmar and arrived in Bangkok. After a plan to fly to the U.S. using forged passports fell through, they boarded the Golden Venture bound for Kenya. From Kenya the ship picked up additional Chinese human cargoes, circled the Cape of Good Hope, and then crossed the Atlantic.
Ten people drowned when they tried to jump off the stranded ship. The other passengers were taken into immigration custody. It remains to this date the largest apprehension of undocumented immigrants in American history. The Golden Venture arrived in the middle of a great wave of illegal migration from the southeastern coast China that started in the mid-1980’s and accelerated after the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. In fact, only three days before the Golden Venture’s arrival, two ships carrying nearly 300 Chinese migrants were apprehended within hours of each other off the coast of San Francisco.
The Golden Venture incident set off a media frenzy which in turn led to panic inside the United States government. Like the Biden administration in 2023, the new Clinton administration did not want to be seen as losing control of the nation’s borders. A swift decision was made to subject the Golden Venture passengers to long-term detention. U.S. officials explained publicly that imprisonment was intended to deter people in China from starting the same journey. This policy represented a sharp break from the prior general practice where asylum applicants were given a future court date and then released with a temporary work permit. A substantial part of the Golden Venture passengers was detained for four years. And what started as a one-off emergency response soon became entrenched as a matter of statute. In 1996, Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to provide for mandatory detention of foreign nationals in various circumstances. For example, asylum applicants who arrive without documents or with fraudulent documents must be detained. See 8 U.S.C. 1225(b)(1)(B)(iii)(IV) (such persons “shall be detained pending a final determination of credible fear of persecution and, if found not to have such a fear, until removed”); Dep’t of Homeland Sec. v. Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. ___ (2020) (preclusion of judicial review of the detention of asylum seekers does not violate the Suspension Clause). The detention requirement most controversially applies to long-term residents of the United States who are subject to deportation because of a criminal record. See e.g., Demore v. Kim, 538 U.S. 510 (2003) (upholding such detention against a Fifth Amendment due process challenge). As a result, a thriving private prison industry has emerged to cater to the needs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The arrival of the Golden Venture also led to sharp gyrations in substantive eligibility for asylum. Under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, asylum had been generously granted for violations of China’s draconian one-child policy, which was often implemented with no regard for human dignity. That generosity no doubt stemmed at least in part from the Republican Party’s vocal pro-life position. To reduce the perceived magnet effect and lacking the need to defer to the religious right, the Clinton administration reinterpreted asylum law to say that because the birth control program applied to the entire Chinese population, it could not form the basis of an asylum claim, even to the extent that physical force was used compel compliance. This is how matter stood until the fall of 1996, when the new Republican majorities in Congress amended the refugee definition to expressly protect individuals who have been persecuted by undergoing a forced abortion or involuntary sterilization. The detention of the Golden Venture passengers and the horrific punishment they endured for wanting to have more than one child was at the heart of the public relations campaign for the legislative change. This new law has opened a pathway to American citizenship and the prosperity that comes with it to tens of thousands Chinese nationals. Its codification in the INA has means that the asylum policy is insulated from abrogation by future Democratic administrations.
The law enforcement crackdown in the wake of Golden Venture ended the business of smuggling people on big freighters. But that did not by any means end unlawful Chinese migration to the United States. In the last two decades, China is consistently a top source country for asylum applications filed in the United States. Indeed, the City of New York has estimated that almost half of the new Chinese migrants to the city have been under the U.S. asylum program. Recent news events strongly suggest that illegal Chinese immigrants will continue to come the United States to seek the freedom and economic opportunities that are not available in their country of birth. The allure of the American Dream is irresistible to those living under totalitarianism.
KJ