A growing number of Chinese migrants are crossing the southern border

The wave of migrants entering the United States through the southern border includes more and more people coming from a surprising place: China.

Despite the distances and difficulties of the journey, more than 24,000 Chinese citizens have been apprehended entering the United States from Mexico in the past year. That is more than in the previous ten years combined, government data show.

They usually fly to Ecuador, where they do not need a visa. Then, like hundreds of thousands of other migrants from Central and South America and areas further afield, they pay smugglers to guide their journey through the dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama on their way to the United States. Once there, they turn themselves in to border officials and many seek asylum.

And most succeed, which in turn encourages further attempts. Chinese citizens are more successful than people from other countries with their asylum applications in immigration court. And those that aren’t end up staying because China usually doesn’t take them back.

In the polarizing debate over immigration, it is a little-discussed wrinkle in the American system: American officials cannot force countries to take back their own citizens. For the most part, this isn’t a problem. But about a dozen countries are not very cooperativeand China is the worst offender.

Of the 1.3 million people in the United States under final orders for deportation, about 100,000 are Chinese, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal data.

The migrants are part of an exodus of citizens who have grown frustrated with harsh restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic and the leadership of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian government. This trend is also called the ‘run philosophy’, with citizens fleeing to Japan, Europe and the United States.

“The biggest reason for me is the political climate,” Mark Xu, 35, a Chinese primary and secondary school English teacher, said in February as he waited to board a boat in Necoclí, Colombia, a beach town in the north. China was so suffocating, he added, that it was “hard to breathe.”

He was among about a hundred Chinese migrants who left that morning to begin the journey through the treacherous Darién Gap, the only land route from South America to the United States. Mr. Xu said he heard about the trek through YouTube and Google searches, including “how to get outside China” and “how to escape.”

For the past two years, the area has been one of the most difficult parts of a desperate journey for large numbers of migrants seeking to move north. Panamanian officials say 481,000 people have crossed the jungle so far this year, compared to 248,000 last year.

Most migrants are Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Haitians fleeing crises at home, including economic and security problems. But this year, more and more Chinese have embarked on this journey.

So many have crossed that Chinese civilians are now the fourth largest group crossing the jungle.

Many fly to Turkey before heading to Ecuador and heading to the United States.

More than 24,000 came to the United States in fiscal year 2023, according to government data. Fewer than 15,000 Chinese migrants have been caught illegally crossing the southern border over the past decade.

Historic levels of migration across the southern border pose a major political problem in the United States, where President Biden is under intense pressure to curb the flow; Chinese migrants form a small fraction.

Most of those who came to the United States in the past year were middle-class adults who moved to New York after their release.

New York has also been a major destination for migrants from other countries, especially Venezuelans, who rely on the city’s resources, including its shelters. But few Chinese migrants stay in the reception centers. Instead, they’re going where Chinese citizens have been going for generations: Flushing, Queens. Or for some, the Chinese Manhattan.

“New York is a self-sufficient Chinese immigrant community,” said the Rev. Mike Chan, executive director of the Chinese Christian Herald Crusade, a faith-based group in the area. Newcomers don’t need to speak English because many speak Mandarin or Cantonese, he added, which also makes it easier to find a job. That kind of network helps people find immigration lawyers, housing and other basic needs.

Their route to Vlissingen through a South American jungle is what sets the most recent arrivals apart. In the past, most Chinese asylum seekers obtained a visa and then applied once they arrived in the United States. The last time such an influx of Chinese migrants entered the country illegally was by sea in the 1990s. But the current volume is much higher.

“America is the greatest power in the world, isn’t it?” a 29-year-old Chinese migrant who would identify himself only by his nickname and surname, Little Xu, said recently outside a Taiwanese tea shop in Vlissingen. Mr. Xu took a break from his job as a messenger and asked that his full name not be used for fear of retaliation.

He left China, he said, to find work. “I have lost hope where I lived,” he said, describing his job as a jewelry salesman in central Hubei province and how his boss stopped paying him. Mr.

Migrants seeking asylum must wait about six months after submitting their applications before being allowed to work legally. More recent arrivals will wait years for their cases to be processed through the system.

In general, Chinese asylum seekers are more successful in immigration court than most others. About 67 percent of asylum seekers from China were granted asylum between 2001 and 2021. data analyzed by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

And those ordered removed are unlikely to be deported.

Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said as long as that happened, the migration trend would continue.

“If you make it to the US, you are more likely to be able to stay or not,” he said. “So it’s definitely worth taking that risk.”

Still, the exodus of Chinese citizens, especially those of working age, to the United States and elsewhere poses a long-term challenge for China, said Carl Minzner, a senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

For the first time in sixty years, China’s population is shrinking, with fewer births than deaths. And the economy is growing at its slowest pace in forty years.

With other countries that do refused to take back their citizensthe United States withheld aid funds or used similar means to obtain cooperation. It also has the ability to restrict access to certain visas, as happened in 2017 with Cambodia, Eritrea, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

But these have not been convincing arguments for China, which receives little American aid. And as relations with the United States have deteriorated over the years, this issue does not seem to be a priority.

When Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi met last week at an international summit in San Francisco, for example, immigration was absent from their discussion. Instead, they discussed fentanyl, U.S. business investment in China and export controls, among other topics.

In the past, American diplomats have tried to work with the Chinese government to convince it to repatriate its citizens, and the response has usually been the same.

“They would simply refuse to acknowledge that the person was Chinese,” said Michele Thoren Bond, a former assistant secretary of state worked on these issues.

“It is not credible that a country that documents and monitors its citizens as closely as China does not have photographs of every citizen,” Ms Bond added.

Reporting was contributed by Mable Chan And Li Yuan New York, Julie Turkewitz in Necoclí, Colombia and Federico Rios in Medellín, Colombia.