Shanghai Youths Test Welcome Mat in U.S.

SHANGHAI — They had more money and power than most people in China. But a group of elite Shanghai families also wanted their children to have a piece of the American dream.

Each family handed over $19,000 in cash to send their sons and daughters--32 in all--to Los Angeles in late January for a one-month English study program. In many ways, they’re still paying.

When the time came in early March for the 14 boys and 18 girls to return to Shanghai, they gathered in front of the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX. Program organizers handed students their plane tickets, shook hands and said goodbye. A sharply dressed Chinese American woman with a black Mercedes was there, helping interpret.

Then a fleet of vans driven by Asian men pulled up. They swept up the kids and their bags and sped off, leaving the counselors dumbfounded and frightened. The counselors called police.

At first, there was speculation of a mass defection or, more likely, a kidnapping. The teens, after all, were the children of Shanghai’s elite: government officials, executives and bankers. Police launched an intensive search.

The youths were found 48 hours later, ensconced in host-family homes, waiting to start a second program. The police--reassured by parents in long-distance calls to China--dismissed the melee as confusion between rival schools.

It wasn’t. Investigations by the U.S. State Department and Immigration and Naturalization Service and interviews with the parents indicate that the incident at the airport was a glitch in a sophisticated new immigration ploy--parlaying a short-term student visa into, potentially, a U.S. passport.

The parents call it giving their children the best opportunity. The U.S. government calls it “an alien-smuggling conspiracy.”

But more than anything, it is a story that shows how porous the U.S. immigration law is, and how attractive America remains for Chinese despite a rapidly improving standard of living in their homeland.

“In China, we can have only one child. These are our princes and princesses,” said the tearful father of a 17-year-girl in the program. “We will do anything for them.”

At the center of the maelstrom, according to the parents and U.S. officials, is the woman with the Mercedes-Benz: Mary Yu. A well-spoken, 40ish woman who worked for the Shanghai city government before she immigrated to the United States, she was hired by the New Jersey-based ELS Language Center to recruit Chinese students for its English program.

The parents told of a well-connected woman who knew the rules: If legitimately obtained, a student visa can be extended as long as the visa holder stays in school. It is a benefit designed more for university students to continue on to graduate school than for one-month language students to stay on indefinitely.

But Yu, the parents said, told them that they were “very lucky.” If the students came in through the door of a reputable program, the student visa could be extended for years. It was like a free pass to America, the parents thought.

Yu stood to profit up to $10,000 for each of the 32 students, calculates Daniel Chiu, the travel agent Yu hired to take the students from the airport to the second program. At least one group was already settled in the U.S., he said, and she was beginning to assemble a third before the airport incident.

“This was not a case of sending young people to study for a few years in the United States. It was a fee-for-service alien-smuggling conspiracy,” said a U.S. official in Beijing.

“She may not be bringing them over in the bottom of a ship, but she’s still a snakehead,” he said, using the slang term for Chinese-immigrant smugglers.

Yu has refused all comment on this story through her lawyer.

Japan, China Send Most Foreign Students

After Japan, China sends the most foreign students to U.S. schools. The State Department issues about 13,000 visas a year to Chinese students; 90% don’t go home.

Last year, U.S. officials began to notice that more and more high school exchange students were not returning. The disappearance of the Shanghai group put the issue on the front burner.

“I’ve never seen this happen with a group so large or so young,” said a U.S. consular officer in Shanghai.

As a result, the Shanghai group has become a test case: If all 32 don’t return to China by Tuesday, say U.S. officials, it may dry up visas for other young students who want to come here. Only Congress can change the law to close the loophole, but consular officers say they will “definitely reevaluate” how to interpret it.

“If students from these kind of well-established families have to resort to fraud to get a visa, what does it say about others?” said the official in Shanghai. “It means it will be very tough for students to get a visa in the future.”

Visa law dictates that all applicants be considered potential immigrants until they can convince the officer that they will come back home. Lying while applying or entering the country violates U.S. law and is cause for canceling a visa or curtailing a stay.

U.S. officials worry that this group is a new generation of “parachute kids”--youths dropped alone into the U.S. to grow up here and become naturalized by sponsorship of a relative or company, or by marriage. While in the U.S., they are cared for by a relative or family friend, or sometimes just a maid.

One day, they can sponsor other family members to follow.

“The parents think they’re doing the best thing, but it causes some serious social disconnects that are really quite tragic,” said a State Department official who in his long posting to Asia has watched the phenomenon roll from Taiwan to Hong Kong and now perhaps the mainland. “When I look at this Shanghai group, I suspect the same thing is happening.”

But in the case of the “Shanghai 32,” visa officials were convinced that they would come back. The students were from wealthy, powerful families. Among the parents are a judge, a local Communist Party leader, government officials, international pilots and a school principal. Surely, if anyone was aware of the rules and had a future in China, it was the students in this group.

The ELS program they had applied to, owned by Berlitz International, is reputable and has a good track record of delivering students back to China. Furthermore, many of the applicants were too young to stay in the U.S. on their own, consular officials thought.

“These are exactly the kind of people we wanted to give visas to,” the visa officer said.

ELS spokesmen refused to comment on the case. But U.S. officials in Shanghai said an ELS representative has taken pains--even flying to China--to reassure the U.S. government that the program didn’t know that the children did not plan to return and that ELS has since severed its relationship with Yu.

As the students prepared in Shanghai and neighboring Suzhou for their visa interviews, they were already getting their first lesson from Mary Yu, some of the parents say. Yu instructed the students to tell visa officers that they would return from the ELS program after one month, parents say.

But while the parents pointed to Yu, a letter to parents from the consul general in Shanghai warned that they would be held accountable for misrepresentation on their children’s visa applications.

Most students are allowed a 60-day grace period before they have to come home. Parents say Yu told them that, for a fee of $19,000, she would find the children another language school and help them stay as long as they wanted.

According to the parents, it was a pay-as-you-stay program--after six months, Yu would ask for more money--and the amount was to be determined later.

The parents said they paid her in U.S. dollars--cash--before their children left in January, but they say that, even then, they did not know her full name. Yu gave a cellular phone number but said they should let her contact them, the parents said.

“We wanted to improve the chances for our child, to give her a competitive edge,” said one mother, a manager of a joint-venture company. “We think it is better for her to stay in America.”

This was not a gullible group. In addition to the government officials, there are international businesspeople who travel to the U.S. occasionally; some have learned the loopholes of immigration law as well as most lawyers.

Parents in Shanghai Concerned About Kids

In Shanghai, where an average middle-class family income is about $8,000 a year and people need special permission to exchange local currency into dollars, those who can come up with such a huge payment are clearly among the city’s elite.

Although few of the families knew one another before their children went to the United States together, they are now bound by mutual concern.

“We trusted [Yu] with our children, the treasure of our families,” one father said. “Now we regret sending them over there,” he said. Like other families who spoke to reporters, he did not speak on the record because as long as the students are in the U.S., they depend on Yu, he said.

While at the second school, the students lived in apartments that Yu had arranged. She held their legal guardianship and, at times, their passports, the parents say.

The students first joined an English language program at the University of Redlands, staying with host families. They were ecstatic at the beginning, marveling at the beauty of California and the friendly people there.

“It’s a paradise,” one daughter told her mother just after she arrived. “I want to stay forever.”

But they soon started to complain about the program and its strict controls.

Under ELS policies designed to prevent foreign students from disappearing, the students had to surrender their passports and immigration documents, and the host families were asked not to let them call home. The kids were not told where they were going before excursions and were not allowed to travel on their own. They were even followed to the bathroom, one girl said.

Several students protested to teachers that their human rights were being violated and that they were better treated in China. One host family did allow one girl to call her parents in Shanghai. “She said it was like a prison,” her mother said.

But there was much the students did not say. The parents said the youths had been warned by Yu not to talk to their host families about their plans to stay longer than a month.

The language program was obligated to put the students back on the plane to Shanghai, but Yu had arranged for them to be taken from the terminal to their next destination, parents say. The program’s representative stressed to U.S. consular officials here that this was done without its knowledge.

There was yet another secret: Some of the teens wanted to leave Yu’s control.

As the ELS program neared the end, Yu had called a few of the students’ parents asking for more money. Yu held the students’ passports and said that, without another payment, she would send the children home, according to one family’s lawyer, Ping Shen. Family members who taped the conversation warned Yu that they would send the tape to American police if she didn’t release their son from her control.

After the March 2 airport incident, that boy and four other students broke away from Yu with the help of a California lawyer and scattered to friends and relatives across the U.S.

The other 27 were to transfer to two other language programs, but after the confusion, the schools had second thoughts about taking members of the group.

After some scrambling, they ended up at another language school, the Pacific Rim Language Institute in Rowland Heights, on March 10.

They enrolled for double sessions of classes and appeared to be settling in. They were lodged in a nearby apartment building, four to a room.

“As far as I know, they’re here legally,” school director Kurt Swain said in late March. “As long as they maintain their academic status, they can stay.”

They seemed extremely bright and enthusiastic about their studies, he said. But he added: “I have seen plenty of parachute kids . . . and I’m worried about them here. I don’t know if they’re getting the emotional and psychological support that they need.”

Then, on April 13, came an ultimatum. The U.S. consul general in Shanghai sent the parents a stern letter: If the children did not appear in person at the consulate in Shanghai by May 4, it warned, the parents would be considered accomplices to immigrant smuggling. Their names would be entered into a worldwide database of people who are not permitted to enter the United States--a list dominated by drug dealers, terrorists and immigrant smugglers.

In addition, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ruled in April that, as of Thursday, the students would be in the country illegally and would have to return home.

Pros and Cons Seen to Staying in U.S.

Pressure also came from embarrassed authorities in China.

In Shanghai, officials from the Public Security Bureau, the Education Commission and the students’ schools “made clear the advantages and disadvantages of having their children stay in America,” said Zhang Canghai, from the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission.

One mother, fiddling with a rhinestone button on her fur-trimmed jacket, worried that because the students “have attracted the attention of the [Chinese] government, we don’t know what the consequences will be for their future here.

“At the least, it will be hard emotionally. They are from very prestigious families, and everyone will know that they have done something so bad, the authorities forced them to come home. Some of the children have said they don’t know how they can live on if they return to Shanghai.”

China Mulls Controls on Studying Abroad

Days before the deadline, parents were still maneuvering, pondering ways to keep their kids in the U.S.

“Our children’s lives are being sacrificed to other people’s mistakes,” said one father, a university professor. “Why are they being punished so severely?”

But a U.S. official in Beijing who has conferred with Chinese officials about the group said: “This is an extremely important case. If they get to stay, I know 3 million other people who are just as deserving who will want to go too.”

“It’s quite possible these students have burnt the bridge for other students to come,” said Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Bill Strassberger.

The Chinese government, which only recently lifted the requirement for students to post bonds before going overseas, is considering reinstalling tight controls over the system, even proposing to ban high school study overseas.

The final irony: “For the kids, the tragedy is that if they had done it the right way, they could have gotten a visa again,” said a consular official in Shanghai. Now, he said, they will have trouble ever entering the U.S. again.

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Times staff writer Joe Mozingo in Los Angeles contributed to this report.