For 12 months Zhang Lianyun gambled that she could be anonymously absorbed into the Marshall Islands population, but her luck finally ran out at Christ-mas when she became the latest statistic in a crackdown on Chi-nese overstayers.
The dragnet sweeping through the capital Majuro is in the hands of Assistant Attorney-General Jack Jorbon, who has the task of eradicating the hangover of an ill-fated passport sales program.
In the past year Jorbon has charged about 30 Chinese overstayers among an estimated 250 -- or 1 percent of the Marshalls capital -- whose visas have expired.
Many have been in the central Pacific island nation for several years, largely as a result of a mid-1990s passport sales program that drew the Marshalls, which has diplomatic relations with Taipei and not Beijing, to their attention.
At least 2,000 passports were sold before the program was terminated in 1996 following complaints from the US State Department about passport purchasers attempting to illegally use the documents to enter the US.
Many Chinese who bought their citizenship set up businesses in Majuro, attracting other compatriots who arrived on 30-day visitor visas and then stayed on.
The combination of lax immigration policing and the potential to enter the US by marrying a Marshall Islander made it an attractive destination.
For Zhang and others, the risk of staying on in the Marshalls, which has a strategic partnership with the US under a Compact of Free Association, outweighed the threat of jail if caught.
Immigration officers say she was among three Chinese nationals arrested at Christmas after staying in the country despite being given two weeks to leave in mid-June.
Jorbon said the big challenge is to get overstayers to leave, especially as no action had been taken against them for many years and the return airline tickets they arrived with had long expired.
"The crux of the problem is they say they have no money to buy an airline ticket," Jorbon said, adding the government did not want to pay for deporting overstayers.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
YELLOW SHIRTS: Many protesters were associated with pro-royalist groups that had previously supported the ouster of Paetongtarn’s father, Thaksin, in 2006 Protesters rallied on Saturday in the Thai capital to demand the resignation of court-suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and in support of the armed forces following a violent border dispute with Cambodia that killed more than three dozen people and displaced more than 260,000. Gathered at Bangkok’s Victory Monument despite soaring temperatures, many sang patriotic songs and listened to speeches denouncing Paetongtarn and her father, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and voiced their backing of the country’s army, which has always retained substantial power in the Southeast Asian country. Police said there were about 2,000 protesters by mid-afternoon, although
RSS