Below The Beltway

For reasons that remain a mystery, Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign is receiving a lot of donations from busboys and dishwashers in New York’s Chinatown that nobody can seem to locate:

NEW YORK — Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.

And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.

At this point in the presidential campaign cycle, Clinton has raised more money than any candidate in history. Those dishwashers, waiters and street stall hawkers are part of the reason. And Clinton’s success in gathering money from Chinatown’s least-affluent residents stems from a two-pronged strategy: mutually beneficial alliances with powerful groups, and appeals to the hopes and dreams of people now consigned to the margins.

Clinton has enlisted the aid of Chinese neighborhood associations, especially those representing recent immigrants from Fujian province. The organizations, at least one of which is a descendant of Chinatown criminal enterprises that engaged in gambling and human trafficking, exert enormous influence over immigrants. The associations help them with everything from protection against crime to obtaining green cards.

Many of Clinton’s Chinatown donors said they had contributed because leaders in neighborhood associations told them to. In some cases, donors said they felt pressure to give.

If you’re wondering where these dishwashers and busboys are getting $ 1,000 or more to donate to a political campaign, you’re not the only one:

The tenement at 44 Henry St. was listed in Clinton’s campaign reports as the home of Shu Fang Li, who reportedly gave $1,000.

In a recent visit, a man, apparently drunk, was asleep near the entrance to the neighboring beauty parlor, the Nice Hair Salon.

A tenant living in the apartment listed as Li’s address said through a translator that she had not heard of him, although she had lived there for the last 10 years.

Now, at least a few of the people that the LA Times tracked down do appear to actually exist and apparently did give money to Clinton, but even their reasoning for doing so is odd:

At his tiny restaurant in the south Bronx, which has one table and a takeout counter, Chang Jian Lin displays a prized memento: a photo of himself and Clinton. The picture was taken at a fundraising banquet in Chinatown this spring.

Lin and his wife, who also works in the restaurant, said through an interpreter that they believe Clinton, if elected president, will reunite their family. The Lins’ two teenage children remain in Fujian, a mountainous coastal province in southeastern China opposite Taiwan.

“If she gets to be the president, we want our children to come home,” Chang Jian Lin said.

Campaign officials point out that Clinton has sponsored legislation aimed at family reunification; the proposals failed. And immigration measures being discussed in Congress would assign a lower priority to family reunification, which tends to bring in poor people, and give preference to immigrants with more-lucrative job skills.

Moreover, the Lins appeared to have an exaggerated impression of a president’s ability to change such things as immigration laws single-handedly.

The Clinton campaign, of course, knows this. The poor restaurant owner, apparently, does not.

As of right now, there’s no evidence that anything illegal is going on here, but it sure is darned suspicious that such large sums of money would be coming from people who wouldn’t seem to have much to begin with, and who haven’t been all that involved in politics in the past. And it all sounds a little too much like the Indonesian monks who gave money to Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign who were acting as a front for other contributors.