U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed that since October 1, more than 20,000 Chinese nationals have unlawfully entered the United States via the southern border.
Poor economic conditions and a lack of basic freedoms are leading many middle-class Chinese nationals to make the difficult, dangerous, and expensive journey to attempt to claim asylum in the United States, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The majority of Chinese migrants begin the trek north in Ecuador, which does not require a visa for Chinese passport holders. A recent CNN report notes that Ecuador saw more than 45,000 Chinese arrive in the country in the first 11 months of 2023.
Many of the migrants who spoke with CNN said that the three-year lockdown due to COVID-19 made life impossible in China, and recent crack-downs by the Chinese Communist Party on private businesses and religion have only made things worse.
The recent surge at the southern border is historic and marks a 500% increase over the same period in 2023, according to reporting by Fox News. In 2021, there were just 450 unlawful Chinese migrants apprehended at the border for the entire year.
The vast majority of migrants are seeking asylum for fear of persecution and to escape poverty, but the chance that some are agents of the Chinese Communist Party exists, according to the president of the National Border Patrol Council, Brandon Judd, who spoke with Fox News about the surge.
However, the Niskanen Center, a non-profit policy organization that analyzed data from immigration and asylum courts, claimed that the possibility that Communist agents are using lax asylum rules to gain access to the United States is likely very low, even though unlawful Chinese migrants seeking asylum in 2023 had an 82% success rate, significantly higher than the 47% logged by all other nationalities.
The center explained that the vast majority of unlawful Chinese migrants self-report to the Border Patrol, while most other nationalities only apply for asylum when faced with deportation proceedings.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence, August Pfluger (R-TX), questioned whether China could be using lax enforcement at the border as a means to smuggle fentanyl and create chaos in the United States during hearings that led to the House impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this month, as reported by The Dallas Express.
In September, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced legislation that would bar so-called asylum seekers from the United States who have ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“The American people are facing the repercussions of the Biden administration’s open border policy, which is creating chaos and putting our communities at risk,” a previous statement from Rubio reads. “We don’t know who’s illegally entering our nation. This presents an opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party to further take advantage and threaten our democracy and national security interests.”
The increase in unlawful Chinese migrants has been pronounced in the San Diego sector and comes as unlawful migrant numbers slump in other areas, notably in Texas, where efforts by the state to prevent border crossings have reportedly been relatively successful. Numbers in January totaled around 170,000 encounters, nearly half of the historic numbers logged in December 2023.
Despite the statistical increase in unlawful Chinese migration, the numbers of Chinese unlawful migrant encounters are still substantially below encounters with migrants from Central and South America. Fox News reported that around 90% of the Chinese migrants are encountered in the San Diego sector, but the region accounts for just a small portion of the total encounters along the border.
