Border crossings and campaign trails: Chinese migration at the US southern border
border crossings and campaign trails: Chinese migration at the US southern border
WRITTEN BY DR MEREDITH OYEN
9 November 2024
Unauthorised migration and the contested relationship with China emerged as two vital issues in the 2024 US presidential election. These two issues converge on the US southern border, where a rapid increase in Chinese arrivals through 2023 and the first half of 2024 received intense focus.
The number of immigrants crossing the border from all countries had jumped after President Joe Biden’s administration ended the Trump-era policies meant to deter crossings upon taking office in 2021. An estimated 37,000 Chinese migrants made unauthorised crossings in 2023, compared with less than 2,000 the year before. The numbers peaked in December 2023, but crossings continued until changing politics in mid-2024 helped slow them down. The complexity of the problem has been undermined by political posturing, particularly from President-elect Donald Trump. His particular brand of scaremongering against Chinese immigration is as old as the original 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, but it has implications for future US-China relations.
The rise and fall of mass Chinese migration on the southern border serves as a reminder of the significant extent to which migration and the policies to limit or prevent it are determined by international relations. Tensions in the US-China relationship affected both the US reaction to the rising numbers and the available solutions. Though only one part of a multifaceted diplomatic relationship, transnational migration should not be overlooked as both a factor and a metric in understanding it.
The evolving situation at the border
Several features of the migration across the southern border in 2023-2024 merit closer attention. Chinese nationals — most of them from China’s expansive middle class — travelled overland through the dangerous Darien Gap connecting South and Central America, and then up through Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and finally Mexico to reach the US border. Most began this journey in Ecuador, which had offered visa-free travel for Chinese nationals. Ecuadorian immigration records suggest that migrants largely took a circuitous air travel route through Southeast Asia and Europe before arriving in South America. A disproportionate number hailed from Xinjiang and Hong Kong, but migrants listed nearly every province in China as their point of origin.
Trump is a wild card on China. He has promised to enact high tariffs and deport millions of unauthorised migrants. But in the case of Chinese migrants, antagonising the PRC in one area will not yield cooperation in the other.
The timing of migrants adopting this route was not random. Migrants interviewed upon arrival have cited the experience of the pandemic under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and particularly the draconian zero-COVID policies that trapped whole cities in place until December 2022, as major factors in their decision to emigrate. The pandemic destroyed the livelihoods of small business owners, and the Xi-inspired crackdown on dissent made protesting difficult. With the collapse of direct air travel between China and the United States, concerns about US visa availability, and more scrutiny over exit permits for those bound for the United States, flying directly and requesting asylum or simply overstaying a visa became unworkable. Social media accounts on TikTok, Douyin (the Chinese counterpart to TikTok), YouTube, and message boards offered instructions on how to make the overland journey instead. Social media posts highlighted migrants who had come successfully, previewed the difficulties of the journey and recommended accommodations, buses, and guides along the way.
The trip was expensive. It ranged from several thousand US dollars to fly to Ecuador and make the trip north to tens of thousands of dollars to facilitate permission to fly directly to Mexico. Unbudgeted expenses such as paying smugglers to aid in crossing through newly policed terrain or offering bribes to pass through territory held by drug cartels could skyrocket. And the passage through the Darien Gap was itself physically dangerous.
“Invasion” rhetoric is not new
As the numbers crossing the border increased, voices in the United States raised concerns about the national security implications of the influx of unauthorised Chinese migrants. In April, Trump suggested the migrants were part of a plot by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate the United States and build an army to undermine it. Members of the House Committee on Homeland Security expressed concerns about Chinese spies entering undetected. Representatives of conservative think tanks such as the Center for Immigration Studies warned in a House Committee on Homeland Security subcommittee hearing of the potential for espionage, violence, and smuggling of fentanyl across the border through these migrants. House Democrats pushed back against this characterisation.
The concerns raised by Trump and right-wing observers follow a longstanding pattern in US immigration history. In the 1870s, the anti-Chinese movement voiced concerns about Chinese immigrants, including the idea that vast numbers entering posed a threat of “invasion” and that their supposedly widespread use of opium would lead to addiction among US citizens. The economic challenge of migrants willing to accept salaries below that of white workers merged with these factors to create a widespread and bipartisan call for excluding Chinese labourers upon arrival. The series of acts that became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act endured until 1943, when the optics of excluding a wartime ally proved inconvenient, even if the goals of exclusion remained. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, left-leaning Chinese migrants in the United States came under heavy scrutiny. The FBI raided Chinatown organisations looking for proof of illegal entry, and in some cases, ordered deportations that it could not implement due to the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and China. More recently, the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic in China also led to increased scrutiny and public backlash against Chinese Americans, leading to the rise of a formalised Stop Asian American and Pacific Islander Hate (AAPI) campaign and organisation.
In May, the Chinese Embassy in the United States raised concerns about the rhetoric employed by politicians and some media outlets to refer to the unauthorised migrants. The spokesperson highlighted the importance of international cooperation in stemming the tide of illegal immigration, as well as implementing repatriations. Though ultimately a small percentage of the total number of migrants crossing the US southern border and an equally minor portion of the total number of Chinese emigrants internationally, the novelty of the situation and broader concerns about the porous nature of the border led to significant efforts to close off this avenue of entry.
Between ‘realpolitik’ and the campaign trail
On 4 June, President Biden signed an executive order to limit the number of people who could claim asylum at the border each day to deter new migrants and limit new crossings. Additionally, Ecuador ended visa-free entry for Chinese nationals on 1 July, closing a critical path into the Americas and the route north to the US border. US-Mexican cooperation to intercept migrants early in their journey through Mexico as well as deportation flights directly from Panama back to China have also served to create new barriers for Chinese emigrants hoping to cross into the United States.
China, for its part, originally had little stake in preventing this emigration. More recently, as the migrants have received more and more media attention, there appears to be a new interest in preventing widespread critiques of the Chinese system. As a result, China has made efforts to crack down on online sources for information on how to make the trek, censoring related terms on Douyin and other platforms.
Given their mutual alignment on stopping this pattern of migration, the United States and China have also engaged in extensive negotiations to allow resuming large-scale deportation flights in July and October. Human rights watchers, meanwhile, decry the flights as failing to take into account the circumstances in China that led to emigration in the first place. Chinese migrants have high success rates in obtaining asylum in the United States because of political repression.
On the campaign trail, Trump did not return to the accusation of an invading Chinese army, but he did promise to raise tariffs and insist that only he could go head-to-head with Xi Jinping to protect American interests. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris mentioned the need for continued and increasing communication between the two powers, but by and large, focused on other potential threats to the United States.
The surge in Chinese migration on the Southern border has slowed for the time being. Trump, largely folded the issue into his broader narrative about irregular immigration, his bold plans for mass deportation, and his plans to economically punish China to appeal to his base. Harris focused on other concerns in the quest for the White House.
President-elect Trump is a wild card on China. He has promised to enact high tariffs and deport millions of unauthorised migrants. But in the case of Chinese migrants, antagonising the PRC in one area will not yield cooperation in the other. It will be impossible for him to follow through with both. He will have to prioritise, and his last stint in the White House suggests that will be as much about what serves his own purposes as much as what serves the country.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Meredith Oyen is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she specialises in the history of US foreign relations, Sino-American Relations, and Asian immigration history. Image credit: Flickr/ The White House (archive).