1993 ship grounding affected immigration policy

It was nearly 20 years ago that a rickety old freighter known as the Golden Venture ran aground off Fort Tilden in the Rockaways with its cargo of nearly 300 Chinese immigrants entering the country illegally.

By 2 a.m. on June 6, 1993, while most of New York City slept, a small army of first responders, including the NYPD, FDNY, U.S. Coast Guard, federal immigration officials and others raced to the beach and were greeted by a sight none could forget.

"What I remember was a surrealistic scene," said NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, who also happened to be commissioner at the time. "I saw people jumping off the ship, the lights coming from our blue harbor launches . . . had a blue hue to it. It had this weird feeling of these blue lights and people jumping off the ship."High above the scene was William Mundy of East Meadow, then a crew chief in a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter, who watched in horror as passengers jumped from the 150-foot vessel into the frigid water. Passengers, weakened by malnourishment from a four-month trip around Africa, had been told by the smugglers to jump from the ship, and many did, clothes wrapped in watertight plastic.

"People were so emaciated they just couldn't swim any further and were slipping under water," Mundy recalled.

By dawn, the scene on the beach was of hundreds of passengers who either swam ashore or were taken by police launch. They were a huddled, wet mass trying to keep warm under blankets. In all, 276 Chinese passengers (including some smugglers) and 13 Indonesian crewmen were taken into custody by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. A handful are believed to have made it to Chinatown. Rescuers retrieved six dead from the water -- four more corpses would be found days later.

The Golden Venture incident became a metaphor for the U.S. immigration problems of the day. It underscored how porous the U.S. border had become, with migrants without legal papers brazenly coming over at will.

In response, the Clinton administration vowed to go after human smugglers and took a tough line with the passengers, who fell into an immigration limbo where some remain to this day.

Immigration judges gave a hard look at the migrants' claims that they had fled China because of its one-child policy, denying virtually all of their asylum claims.

But as the anniversary of the ship's landing approaches, apart from articles in New York's Chinese press, there is virtually nothing recalling the incident. No monument or plaque marks the site, which today is just a quiet beachfront scoured last fall by superstorm Sandy.

Many of the passengers, either denied asylum claims or tired of waiting, returned to China. Scores were finally granted lawful status by President Bill Clinton in 1997.

Yet the Golden Venture episode wrought some changes and impacted U.S. immigration policy over the years. It also sparked a profound change in the local populace around York, Pa., where 52 of the male passengers were sent. A generally conservative and anti-abortion group, citizens of York became outraged when they learned of the way the men were being treated, with little access to experienced legal counsel and having their asylum cases, based on China's one-child policy, rushed through the immigration courts.

"People had been oblivious but began to hear the [passengers'] stories," said the Rev. Joan Maruskin, who helped organize support for the immigrants.

Constant lobbying of the White House and Congress by the York activists eventually helped prod Clinton in 1997 to grant the 52 men in York as well as four other passengers humanitarian parole, said Beverly Church, a paralegal who remains involved with the immigrants.

"Every single man on parole has made a positive impact on the community," Maruskin said.