Trail of immigrants seeking work

Illegal Chinese labourers are a fairly recent addition to the prime cockle-picking location of Morecambe Bay.

Before now, illegal workers from China were usually seen working on the fruit farms of Kent and East Anglia, where last year 18 were sharing a three-bedroom home when it caught fire.

Immigrants often end up in the hands of unscrupulous employers - one of whom was exposed in 2000, when 58 Chinese were found suffocated in a lorry at Dover.

Dutch lorry driver Perry Wacker, 33, had been paid by Chinese "Snakehead" gangsters to bring the illegal immigrants into the UK. His partner Ying Guo, a Chinese interpreter, engaged solicitors to get the immigrants out of detention centres and process their asylum applications.

She then handed them over to Snakehead minders until their families in China had paid for their journey or the debt was settled by the immigrants working in the UK.

Wacker was jailed for 14 years for manslaughter. He had shut the lorry's air vent.

Last year 63 Chinese were arrested in raids in Norfolk. But, by the end of last year, only one asylum seeker had been deported.

The problem is made worse by the difficulties in taking legal action against businesses that employ illegal foreign workers.