Have You Met Rutgers-Newark?

When Dr. Ko-Lin Chin is not in China researching organized crime or immigrant smuggling, he is at Rutgers-Newark explaining the workings of organized crime and gangs to his students at the School of Criminal Justice.

In 1993, while Chin was in China researching Asian gangs and gang violence, a story about a boat carrying 300 Chinese immigrants, 10 of whom drowned, was making front pages back in the United States. This led him to start researching immigrant smuggling and author several books on gangs and immigrant smuggling in China. Smuggled Chinese: Clandestine Immigration to the U.S.; Chinatown Gangs: Extortion, Enterprise, Ethnicity; Chinese Subculture and Criminality: Nontraditional Crime Groups in America; and The Prevention of the Illegal Migration of Mainland Chinese to Taiwan have opened eyes to the extent of organized crime that encompasses Asian communities.

Chin’s expertise on Asian gangs and immigrant smuggling has earned him numerous quotes in The New York Times, The Star-Ledger, The Toronto Star, Las Vegas Sun and the Los Angeles Times. Chin was invited to participate in the High Level Political Signing Conference for the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime in the United States in Palermo, Italy. The conference celebrated the launching of the first international instrument against transnational organized crime. Chin also is the author of two books: Heijin: Organized Crime, Business, and Politics in Taiwan, released June 2003, and Golden Triangle: Inside Southeast Asia’s Drug Trade, published January 2009. His forthcoming book, Going Down to the Sea: The Movement of Chinese Women to Asia and the United States for Commercial Sex, written with his colleague James O. Finckenauer, will be published by New York University Press in 2012.

Chin’s research work has been honored with the Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence from Rutgers University, the Henry Rutgers Research Fellowship, the U.S. Department of State’s U.S. Speaker and Specialist Award, and two Fulbright Scholar Awards.

Chin earned his bachelor’s degree in international business from National Taiwan University, his master of business administration with a concentration in finance and master’s in sociology from the University of Houston, and his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

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