Why more Chinese are risking danger at southern border crossings into the US

Gao Zhibin and his daughter left Beijing on February 24 for a better and safer life. Over the next 35 days they traveled by plane, train, boat, bus and on foot through nine countries. By the time they reached American soil in late March, Mr. Gao had lost 30 pounds.

The most harrowing part of their journey was trekking through the unforgiving jungle in Panama known as the Darién Gap. On the first day, Mr Gao, 39, said he suffered heat stroke. The second day his feet swelled. Dehydrated and weakened, he threw away his tent, a moisture-proof sleeping pad and his clean clothes.

Then his 13-year-old daughter got sick. She lay on the floor vomiting, with a pale face, feverish forehead, and her hands on her stomach. Mr. Gao said he thought she might have drunk dirty water. As they dragged themselves through the muddy, treacherous rainforests of the Darién Gap, they took breaks every ten minutes. They didn’t reach their destination, a campsite in Panama, until 9 p.m

Mr Gao said he felt he had no choice but to leave China.

“I think we will only be safe if we come to the US,” he said, adding that he believed Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, could lead the country to famine and possibly war. “It’s a rare opportunity to protect me and my family,” he said.

A growing number of Chinese have entered the United States through the Darién Gap this year, surpassed only by Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Haitians. according to Panamanian immigration authorities.

It is a dangerous route that was once used mainly by Cubans and Haitians, and to a lesser extent by people from Nepal, India, Cameroon and Congo. The Chinese are fleeing the world’s second largest economy.

Educated and affluent Chinese migrate through legal channels, such as education and work visas, to escape bleak economic prospects and political oppression – motivations shared by Darién Gap emigrants.

Most of them followed a playbook circulating on social media: cross the border through the Darién Gap, surrender to U.S. border control officials, be held in immigration jails and seek asylum, citing a credible fear of being sent back to China . Many will be released within days. If their asylum application is accepted, they can work and start a new life in the United States.

Their flight is a referendum on the rule of Xi, who is now in his third five-year term. Boasting that “the East is rising while the West is falling,” he says said in 2021, it emerged that the Chinese model of governance had proven superior to Western democratic systems and that the center of gravity of the global economy was shifting ‘from West to East’.

Every immigrant I interviewed this year who passed through the Darién Gap — a journey known as Zouxian, or walking along the line, in Chinese — came from a lower-middle-class background. They said they feared falling into poverty if China’s economy deteriorated, and that they could no longer see a future for themselves or their children in their home country.

In Mr. Xi’s China, anyone could become a target of the state. You can get into trouble because you are Christian, Muslim, Uyghur, Tibetan or Mongolian. Or an employee asking for back payments, a homeowner protesting the delayed delivery of an unfinished apartment, a student using a virtual private network to access Instagram, or a Communist Party executive found with a copy of a banned book.

According to figures from the US Department of State, more than 24,000 Chinese migrants were temporarily detained at the southern border of the United States in the 2023 financial year. US Customs and Border Protection. Fewer than 15,000 Chinese migrants have been caught illegally crossing the southern border over the past decade.

The wave of desperate Chinese braving the Darién Gap is a reversal of a long-standing pattern.

In the 1980s and 1990s, millions of Chinese migrated to developed countries, including the United States, for higher living standards and freer societies. As China’s economy took off in the early 2000s and the government relented on some control over Chinese society, a large majority of Chinese students returned to their country after graduation. Salaries in China were rising rapidly and employment opportunities were plentiful.

Until September 2018, Mr. Gao a Chinese success story. He grew up in a village in the eastern province of Shandong and moved to Beijing in 2003 to work on the assembly line in an electronics factory. He earned about $100 a month. With street smarts, Mr. Gao made money by helping factories and construction sites hire workers.

In 2007, he rented a plot of land on the outskirts of Beijing and built a building divided into about a hundred small rooms. He earned about $30,000 a year renting them to migrant workers. He married, had two children and also moved his parents to Beijing.

In 2018, the local government wanted the land back for development. Mr. Gao refused. Authorities cut off water and electricity and pumped toilet waste into the yard, forcing the tenants to leave. He won a lawsuit he filed against the government, but received no compensation. When he petitioned the higher authorities, he and his family were harassed, threatened and beaten. He and his wife divorced, hoping the authorities would leave her alone.

In the following years, Mr. Gao odd jobs, spending most of his time on his petition and studying law. Life became very tough during the pandemic. Mr Gao and his ex-wife, who were still living together, had twins in January. He had four children and no job, no future. He was at his wits’ end.

In February, Mr. Gao posts on social media against Chinese people reaching the United States through the Darién Gap. He and his daughter applied for passports and within weeks they flew to Istanbul and then to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, where most Chinese began their journey to the United States.

Another migrant I spoke with who crossed the Darién Gap, Mr. Zhong, who wanted to use only his family name for fear of retaliation, has a background similar to Mr. Gao’s.

Born into a Christian family, he made his way from a village in Sichuan province, southwest China, to a middle-class city life. He trained as a chef at the age of 16 and worked in restaurants throughout China. He struggled financially during the pandemic. To pay his mortgage and car loan, about $800 a month, he worked on an assembly line in 2020.

The trouble for Mr. Zhong, now in his early 30s, began last December when police officers stopped his car for a routine alcohol test and saw a copy of a Bible on the passenger seat. They told Mr. Zhong that he believed in an evil religion and threw the Bible on the ground and stomped on it. The officers then took his phone and installed an app on it that turned out to have software that would track his movements.

On Christmas Day, four police officers broke into a house where Mr. Zhong and three fellow Christians held a prayer service. They were taken to the police station, beaten and interrogated.

Like Mr. Gao, Mr. Zhong came across social media posts about the Darién Gap. He borrowed about $10,000 and left home on February 22.

He said he cried three times. The first was at the end of his first day at the Darién Gap: he lay in his tent full of regret, thinking the journey was too hard. The second time he cried was during a three-day motorcycle ride with a fellow Chinese migrant through Mexico in the pouring rain. He cried again as he was detained at an immigration center in Texas. He applied for asylum and did not know how long he would stay there. It might take three or five years, he thought. He was released after seven days and flew to New York.

When he arrived in Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens and a hub for Chinese immigrants, he was disappointed: the neighborhood was poor and expensive. “I thought it was hard to walk the line,” he said in early April. “Starting a life here is even more difficult.”

Mr. Zhong soon moved to a city of 30,000 in Alabama. He had grown up near Chengdu, a city of twenty million people. Now he felt truly alone. He works eleven hours a day in a Chinese restaurant, he says, and doesn’t want to take a day off. He learned to prepare General Tso’s chicken and other Chinese-American dishes. The pay is much better than in China, and he can send more money home. Every Sunday he participates in an online religious service hosted by a church in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, another community with a large population of Chinese immigrants.

He told me a joke on the phone: “Why did you go to the United States?” someone asks a Chinese immigrant. “Are you unhappy with your pay, your benefits, and your life?” The immigrant answers: “Yes, I am satisfied. But in the US I can say that I am not satisfied.”

“I can live like a real person in the US,” he said.

Mr. Gao and his daughter settle in San Francisco. Life for them is not easy either. We first met in April at a community service center that had helped them find housing: a high school gym in the city’s Mission District.

They could stay there from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., sleep on gym mats and carry all their belongings during the day. Mr. Gao’s daughter started school within two weeks of arriving in the city. He hoped that one day she would be able to visit her mother in China.

They moved into a studio apartment in a shelter. Then Mr. Gao got his work permit, bought a car and started delivering packages for an e-commerce company. He earns $2 per package. The more he delivers, the more he earns.

He repeatedly said how grateful he was for the kindness he had experienced since leaving China. He and his daughter were robbed, extorted and shot at. But strangers gave them bottled water and food. After traveling for three days in an open train car, he and his daughter met a Mexican couple who insisted they take a shower at their home.

On a Wednesday in November, Mr. Gao said, he woke up at 4 a.m., delivered more than 100 packages and didn’t get home until after 9 p.m.

He took the next day off. As Mr. Xi’s motorcade, which was in San Francisco to meet President Biden, passed by, Mr. Gao joined other protesters on the sidewalk and chanted in Chinese: “Xi Jinping, step down!”

Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting of the Darién Gap, and Eileen Sullivan from Washington.