A top member of the House immigration subcommittee on Tuesday blasted the U.S. government for agreeing to return ancient Chinese fossils smuggled here illegally, even as the communist country flouts international conventions by refusing to take back tens of thousands of illegal immigrants.
With an elaborate ceremony planned at the Chinese Embassy on Wednesday, John Morton, the head of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), will turn the 525-million-year-old fossils over to Chinese Charge d’Affaires Xie Feng.
But Iowa Rep. Steve King, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary subcommittee dealing with immigration issues, questioned why the Obama administration was acting so quickly to help a country that has stonewalled requests to take back nationals whom the federal government is trying to deport.
“I hope Assistant Secretary Morton tells the Chinese we have no intention of waiting 525 million years for them to take back the 40,000 Chinese nationals with deportation orders,” Mr. King said.
The dispute over Chinese illegal immigrants has run for years, with China refusing to issue the proper travel documents necessary to let ICE complete the deportations.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff took the dispute public in 2006, and soon after his department said it had reached an agreement to boost the number of illegal immigrants being returned. But the number of those who remain here in limbo is still roughly the same.
ICE officials did not return messages seeking the latest number of how many Chinese nationals are involved, but one source familiar with immigration issues said the number was probably close to 40,000.
Many of those illegal immigrants have reportedly been released from U.S. custody because there is no room to hold them.
China is not the only government that has refused to take back its illegal immigrants, but it is among the biggest offenders, government officials have said.
Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the embassy, said the two issues are separate, though he said they do both involve law enforcement cooperation between the two countries.
“China’s stand on illegal immigration is very clear. It is opposed to illegal immigration and it has been working hard on this goal,” he said. He said key agencies in both countries are in contact on this issue, and said there have been some deportations of several hundred people in the past, though he did not have more specific information.
The Chinese government has argued in the past that it could not be sure of some illegal immigrants’ identities, since many of them destroy their identity documents when they try to enter the United States.
The 100 or so fossils, many of them fragments, were labeled as rocks when they were shipped out of Hong Kong and seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Chicago beginning in December 2007.
Pat Reilly, a spokeswoman for ICE, said the fossils’ worth is about $7,000, but said they’re “priceless in terms of the science of China.”
She said the U.S. investigation of the shipment is ongoing and nobody has been arrested or charged with a crime for receiving the property.
Chinese law prohibits the export of these kinds of fossils under laws governing the export of cultural items.
The fossils are estimated to be 525 million years old, and are from paleovertebrates and paleoanthropoids.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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