For immigration officials, it is a question of questions

"Most of [the immigrants from China] want to join the sex industry here. Many of them have already worked as prostitutes in China. They smoke a lot and have stained teeth."

Liao We-yuan, an immigration bureau official

Immigration Bureau officials in charge of interviewing Chinese immigrants who list marriage as their reason for entering the country face an increasingly challenging task of asking effective but inoffensive questions intended to reveal the immigrants' real purposes for coming here.

The number of Chinese immigrants citing marriage as their purpose for coming to Taiwan has dropped substantially since the implementation of the interview system last September, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) announced earlier this week.

However, human smugglers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are quickly learning the questions bureau officials would ask during the interviews.

The human traffickers collect the questions and teach the immigrants, who according to MAC officials mostly come here to work in the sex industry, how to respond and act during the interviews.

The bureau used to provide its officials with a list of interview questions. Now, after learning that human smugglers have gotten hold of all the questions, the bureau asked its officials to abandon the old set of questions and improvise new questions on their own, chief secretary of the bureau Ho Jung-chung (何榮村) said yesterday.

According to Ho, human smugglers asked immigrants to memorize the questions the bureau asked, and held simulated interviews with them. The smugglers would not allow the immigrants to travel to Taiwan until they passed simulated interviews.

How to outwit human smugglers is now the main challenge for the 30 bureau officials who conduct interviews with Chinese immigrants. The interviews usually last for 30 minutes.

"The officials often ask the interviewees details about their upcoming marriages. They ask where they will get married, how many guests they plan to invite to the marriage ceremony, who will be presiding over the ceremony, etc," Ho said.

Only teaches bureau officials when and how to ask the right questions, Ho said.

Liao Wei-yuan (廖維元), a bureau official at Kaohsiung International Airport, said his interviewees' teeth tell a lot about their real identities.

"Women who lie about their real purpose of coming to Taiwan usually try to use marriage as a cover story. Most of them want to join the sex industry here. Many of them have already worked as prostitutes in China. They smoke a lot and have stained teeth," said Liao.

"I pay special attention to my interviewees' teeth. If their teeth are stained, I ask them more new questions. If they stammer when answering the questions I improvise, it is highly possible their real purpose for coming here is not marriage," Liao said.

When the interview system was implemented last September, one of the questions bureau officials asked was whether their interviewees had sex with their Taiwanese spouses on their wedding days.

"We would try to imitate the way US immigration officials question interviewees in some American movies. We sometimes asked our interviewees the color of the underwear their husbands wore on their wedding day," said Ho.

"But questions like this caused such an outcry that we no longer ask them anymore. We were accused of offending our interviewees' privacy. Now we try to ask more decent questions," Ho continued.