Customs and Border Protection officials say that between January and September 2023, they arrested more than 22,000 people from China who illegally crossed the border into the United States, about thirteen times more than during the same period in 2022.
The pandemic and China’s COVID-19 policies, which included strict border controls, temporarily halted the exodus that increased dramatically in 2018, when President Xi Jinping amended the statutes to remove presidential term limits. Today, emigration has picked up and China’s economy is struggling to recover. and youth unemployment is high. The United Nations predicts that China will lose 310,000 more people to emigration this year, up from 120,000 in 2012.
This is now known as “runxue,” or the study of the fugue. The term began as a way to circumvent censorship, a Chinese character whose pronunciation resembles the English word “run” but means “to wet. “Now it’s a web meme.
“This wave of emigration reflects desperation towards China,” said Cai Xia, editor-in-chief of the online commentary Yibao and a former professor at the Chinese Communist Party’s Central School in Beijing.
“They’ve lost hope in the long-term of the country,” said Cai, who now lives in the United States. “These include skilled and unskilled employees, white-collar workers, as well as small business owners and others from prosperous countries. Origins. -Outside of families. “
Those who can’t get a visa are looking for other tactics to flee the world’s most populous country. Many show up at the U. S. -Mexico border to seek asylum. The Border Patrol has made 22,187 arrests of Chinese nationals for illegally crossing the border from Mexico since January. As of September, almost thirteen times the same era in 2022.
Chinese arrests peaked at 4,010 in September, up 70 percent from August, making it the ninth-highest nationality at the U. S. border and the highest outside of Mexico, Central and South America. The vast majority were single adults.
The most popular direction to the United States is through Ecuador, which does not require a visa for Chinese citizens. Immigrants from China join Latin Americans heading north through the once-impenetrable Darien and through several Central American countries before reaching the U. S. border. The adventure is well-known enough to have its own name in Chinese: rope walking or “zouxian. “
The monthly number of Chinese migrants crossing the Darien has risen from 913 in January to 2,588 in September. In the first nine months of this year, the Panamanian immigration government registered 15,567 Chinese nationals crossing the Darien. By comparison, 2,005 Chinese crossed the rainforest in 2022, and only 376 in total between 2010 and 2021.
Short-form video platforms and messaging apps will offer not only on-the-ground video clips, but also step-by-step guides, from China to the United States, adding tips on what to pack, where to locate guides, how to be in the jungle, which hotels. how much to bribe police in other countries, and what to do when you meet with U. S. immigration officials.
Translation apps allow immigrants to navigate Central America on their own, even if they don’t speak Spanish or English. They can collect thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars, funded through family savings or even online loans.
This is a far cry from the days when Chinese citizens paid smugglers, known as snakeheads, and traveled in groups.
With more monetary resources, Xi Yan, 46, and his daughter Song Siming, 24, did not take the Ecuador-Mexico route, but flew to Mexico via Europe. With the help of a local guide, the two women crossed the U. S. border into Mexicali in April.
“The unemployment rate is very high. People can’t find work,” said Xi Yan, a Chinese writer. “Small business owners can’t keep their businesses afloat. “
Xi Yan said he made the decision to leave China in March, when he was on his way to the southern city of Foshan, to see his mother, but had to leave the next day when state security agents and police harassed his brother and told him his sister was not allowed to enter the city. She learned she was still on the state’s blacklist, six years after she was arrested for collecting at a beachfront site in memory of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in a Chinese prison. In 2015, she was jailed for 25 days because of an online post remembering the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
Her daughter Song agreed to accompany her. The daughter, a college graduate, struggled to find paintings in China and was depressed, the mother said.
Despite the difficulties he faces in surviving in the United States, Xi Yan said he values it.
“We have freedom,” he said. I used to get nervous every time a police car drove by. Now I don’t have to worry about that. “
Migrants waiting to enter the U. S. in San Diego wait for agents to pick them up at a domain between two border walls or in remote mountains east of the city, covered in bushes and giant rocks.
Many immigrants are released with court dates in the cities closest to their final destination, in a bottleneck formula that takes years to cases. Chinese immigrants were granted an asylum rate of 33% in fiscal year 2022, compared to 46% for all nationalities. according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Catholic charities in San Diego are hotels to offer refuge to immigrants, with 1,223 arriving from China in September. The average length of stay in a safe haven is one and a half days for all nationalities. For Chinese visitors, it’s less than a day.
“They leave them in the morning. In the afternoon, they go out to locate their families. They go to New York, they go to Chicago, they go to all kinds of places,” said Vino Pajanor, the group’s executive leader. “They don’t need to be in a shelter. “
In September, 98% of Chinese arrests at the U. S. border occurred in the San Diego area. At the transit stop, migrants check their phones, grab a snack, examine piles of baggy clothing and receive tips.
Signs on portable toilets and data booths, as well as volunteers’ loudspeaker announcements about free airport shuttle services, are translated into several languages in addition to Mandarin. Taxi drivers will offer rides to Los Angeles.
Many of the immigrants who spoke to the AP gave their full names, for fear of drawing attention to their cases. Some said they came here for economic reasons and paid between 300,000 and 400,000 yuan (between 41,000 and 56,000 U. S. dollars for the trip).
In recent weeks, Chinese migrants have filled makeshift camps in the California desert as they wait for the U. S. government to register their asylum claims.
Near the small town of Jacumba, many other people huddled in the shadow of a segment of the border wall and under rudimentary tarps. Others tried to sleep on giant rocks or under a few trees. Small campfires keep them warm during the night. Without food or running water, migrants rely on volunteers to hand out bottled water, hot oatmeal, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Chen Yixiao said that he went through a complicated adventure to come to the United States. He said life was complicated in his country, with some immigrants having problems with the government and others failing in their businesses.
This is the land of my dreams,” said Chen, who planned to join relatives in New York and locate paintings there.
At the San Diego transit station, Deng planned to go to Monterey Park, a Los Angeles suburb known as “Little Taipei” in the 1980s. Deng said he worked in Guangdong, which required him to ride motorcycles, which he considered dangerous. He stood at the transit station, sitting on a sidewalk with his small backpack, several Africans approaching him to ask him questions. He told them he had arrived in the U. S. with $880 in his pocket.
Because he provided a deal to the Border Patrol in the United States, an agent subpoenaed him to appear in immigration court in New York for the first time in February. Deng used his meager savings to buy a one-way flight to New York. . He met thousands of other immigrants in a sheltered tent on Randall’s Island, not knowing what his next move would be.
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Associated Press writers Christopher Sherman in Mexico City and Eugene Garcia in San Diego contributed to this report.
Mexican Navy officers patrol Playas de Tijuana, near the U. S. -Mexico border, in the state of Baja California, Mexico. (Photo by GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP Getty Images)
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