Most of the Vietnamese caught came from rural northern Vietnam, paid high fees to be smuggled to Taiwan

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/07/08
By: George Liao, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The number of Vietnamese attempting to illegally enter Taiwan has increased this year, with the Coast Guard having intercepted boats attempting to smuggle them in on two separate occasions in the first half of 2020 — one on March 20 involving 31 Vietnamese nationals and the other on July 6 involving 30, according to a Liberty Times report on Wednesday (July 8).

Most of the illegal Vietnamese immigrants came from rural northern Vietnam and paid high fees to be smuggled to Taiwan.

Huang Shih-hsien (黃世賢), deputy chief of the Investigation Branch of the Coast Guard Administration, said Wednesday that almost all of these illegal immigrants had once worked in Taiwan legally but were deported because they had either overstayed their visas or run away from their employers before their contracts had expired. In order to reenter Taiwan, they first snuck across the China-Vietnam border to Guangdong Province with the help of human smugglers, then boarded Chinese fishing boats before transferring to Taiwanese fishing vessels in the Taiwan Strait.    [FULL  STORY]