LAS LISAS IS A DINKY, DROWSY TOWN IN the Dominican Republic, much like others that dot the small Caribbean country's northern coast. Chickens run in the one paved street; pigs root near the pink and green huts. At a roadside stand, a caldron of soup sits outside the door. A few men while away the afternoon hours playing dominoes in the shade of a nut tree.
But nothing in this Potemkin village is as it seems. Las Lisas traffics not in local cuisine or local color but in a dream--the dream of traveling to America. The food hut is actually a check-in station for refugees and their machete-strapped buscones (guides). The men under the nut tree are lookouts, who meet groups of would-be immigrants arriving from Santo Domingo and direct them to hiding places in safe houses and the surrounding jungle. Makeshift boats--weighted down by rocks and submerged in the stream near town--are waiting to take the travelers to the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico, where they can easily board a flight to New York City. Even the chickens have a role in this secret commerce: three times a day a boy delivers slaughtered birds and boxes of white rice to the refugees, who may wait days or weeks for their boat to leave. For a few pesos extra, he will bring a bottle of Brugal, the local rum, to kill the boredom and dull any fears about the dangers that lie ahead. "The town depends on the trips," says an older resident. "When the weather is bad or the police ask for more money and the trips slow down, it becomes like a graveyard."
Increasingly, when people want to go to America--illegally, that is--the Dominican Republic is where they go first. There are dozens of coastal towns just like Las Lisas where the chief industry--sometimes the sole industry--is illegal immigration. It is impossible to say exactly how many thousands of people arrive in the U.S. through the Dominican Republic each year, because official surveillance and interdiction are so spotty. The U.S. Border Patrol and other law-enforcement agencies made 4,364 arrests in the area last year, but that figure bears little relation to the number of people flooding out.
What is clear is that the illegal traffic is growing, and it is international, with refugees arriving on this remote stretch of beach from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, even China and Japan. One telltale sign of the booming refugee trade: the Dominican Republic has become the largest importer of outboard engines in Latin America. Says a U.S. official: "There are boats every day taking people from all over the world into the U.S. through here."
Now that beefed-up law enforcement has made it harder for illegal immigrants to cross the U.S.-Mexican border, the flow has shifted to this point of less resistance. The Dominican Republic's seven busy international airports and minimal visa restrictions make it difficult to monitor the comings and goings of foreigners. And once refugees weather the 110-mile boat trip from the northern coast of the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, they can usually slip onto a U.S.-bound flight without a document check.