Illegal Immigration
After 1989, the number of illegal mainland Chinese immigrants who arrived in Germany by way of Eastern Europe began to increase, only to decrease in the mid-1990s; on average, authorities caught 370 each year in the late 1990s, though they believe the actual extent of illegal migration to be much larger. Many illegal migrants work in restaurants, whose managers sponsor their migration costs and require them to pay them back. Such costs usually amount between to RMB 60,000 and 120,000, paid to snakeheads (Chinese people smugglers). Due to network effects, illegal Chinese migrants to Germany largely come from the vicinity of Qingtian, Zhejiang; they are mostly men between twenty and forty years old. Migrants may come as tourists and then overstay (either by applying for a tourist visa on their genuine PRC passport, or obtaining a forged passport from a country with a large Asian population whose nationals are granted visa-free travel to Germany), or they may be smuggled across the Czech-German border.
Read more about this topic: Chinese People In Germany
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