What drove last year's surge in Chinese migrants at the southern border?

Last year, a record number of Chinese migrants crossed the U.S. southern border without authorization. In search of jobs and freedom from China's heavy-handed pandemic response, they followed paths long walked by migrants from many countries. But here in the U.S. they have come under a different kind of scrutiny, because they hail from America’s biggest geopolitical rival.

Politicians on the right, led by former President Donald Trump, baselessly claim Chinese migrants are spies or drug smugglers, sent by Beijing to harm Americans.

Trump suggested at a rally in May that "military-aged men" are "building a little army in our country."

At the Republican National Convention in July, former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro described migrants crossing the border as "murderers, rapists, human traffickers, terrorists ... Chinese spies."

"Chinese transnational criminal organizations are also ruthlessly exploiting our border's vulnerabilities, fueling the fentanyl crisis that claims thousands of American lives each year," Craig Singleton, a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told a House hearing in May.

None of those claims stands up to scrutiny. Research based on years of federal and local government data shows that unauthorized migrants — from China or elsewhere — do not threaten national security or commit crimes more than other immigrants or people born in the U.S. This June, unauthorized crossings hit the lowest level since 2021, following President Biden's executive actions restricting asylum claims and stepped-up enforcement in Mexico.

"We spend a ton of money and create a lot of fear, but we don't have any good credible evidence [that we should be afraid]," said Rebecca Hester, an associate professor at Virginia Tech who studies migration. "It's good political theater to say 'What if? What if?' and to look like you're hard on crime and hard on immigration. But it's not really helping."

No evidence supports politicians' claims

Many people at the center of these narratives find them perplexing. Among them is Ying, who says she and her husband trekked through the Darién Gap, the treacherous jungle between Panama and Colombia, in search of religious freedom and job opportunities in America. (NPR isn’t using Ying's full name because press reports might draw harassment to her family still in China.)

"The Chinese government can’t be this unsophisticated. Don’t you think it's hilarious?" Ying said on a recent sunny afternoon in the New York City neighborhood of Flushing, Queens.

She was seated among a group of mainly Muslim migrants sharing a meal after Friday prayers: bubbling soup, spiced cold cut meat and vegetables, and plates of cherries and lychee. Some of the women sitting next to her joined in her laughter at the idea, which they were hearing for the first time.

"It’s not impossible," Ying said of the narratives that the Chinese government might be sending in bad people through unauthorized border crossings. "But aren’t most people coming here to live better and escape oppression?"

Her skepticism is shared by those who have long worked on and studied national security and immigration.

There's no indication that Chinese migrants are trying to build an army. Even if there are some people with military backgrounds among the migrants, it’s unfair to assume they are here to sabotage, said Wan Yanhai, a longtime AIDS and human rights activist living in New York City. He's been helping new arrivals with, among other things, administrative work needed to settle in the U.S.

Wan worked alongside veterans in China 20 years ago, organizing people infected with AIDS through contaminated blood transfusions to take legal actions or political actions against the government for compensation. They were campaigners against the Chinese state, not agents of it, he said. "These people are pretty, you know, critical in grassroot social organizing," he said.

Other claims don’t add up either. U.S. government data shows most fentanyl is brought to the country by citizens entering legally.

"China is in the [fentanyl] supply chain, but it's not through these people who have been crossing the border recently," said Elina Treyger, researcher for the RAND Corporation.

As for Beijing sending spies into the U.S. disguised as migrants, while no researcher would rule out the possibility completely, they said the likelihood is low.

"Individuals crossing the southern border have a pretty steep climb before they can find themselves in a place where they have the placement and access to really be of much intelligence value" to the Chinese government, said David Viola, a former Navy intelligence officer who studies terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The difficulties of proving a negative

So what accounts for the persistence of Republicans' claims about Chinese migrants? For one thing, it's difficult to prove that something did not happen.

"Shouldn't the question be 'What is the evidence that unauthorized migrants are a threat?'" said Doug Ligor, a federal immigration lawyer with over a decade of experience who's now a researcher at Rand. "I'm not sure I understand why the migrant community is being asked to prove a negative when those making the claim of the existence of the threat haven't provided any valid studies to show that."

Ligor says there might be more prosaic reasons for the surge of migrants aside from Chinese people struggling to survive their government's pandemic response. For example, it was difficult to get a passport in China during the pandemic.

"That's going to create push factors," he said. "Once those lockdowns are lifted, you know, [that released] basically pent-up migration."

Ultimately, most Chinese migrants are drawn to the U.S. in search of economic opportunities, Ligor said.

While trekking jungles, mountains and desert might evoke military-like resolve, many Chinese migrants describe less dramatic motivations.

Jian Hui is a labor organizer who went to prison in China for fighting for workers' rights. As soon as he got out of jail and managed to get a passport, he embarked on his journey to the U.S., crossing the southern border without authorization.

Jian considered getting a U.S. visa but didn't go through with it. He said if he applied for an American visa in China, "the Chinese government might not let me leave."

And if he applied after getting out of China, Jian said, "it takes forever."

Others said they have no hope of getting a visa at all. Walking through mountains and jungles, even with the possibility of death, became the most viable path.

Anti-migrant rhetoric echoes xenophobic history

Many Chinese migrants are too busy trying to survive in America to notice the narratives about them, said Ju Ma, a leader of the Chinese Muslim community living in New York City. After he saw that some newcomers were sleeping on the streets, he worked with other activists and rented the house where migrants including Ying gathered, letting people stay short-term for free.

"American politicians are verbally abusing the most vulnerable people, using them for political gains," Ma told NPR. He said the way American politicians paint Chinese migrants as threats is akin to how people in the Middle Ages identified witches.

Most labor economists agree there's no evidence that immigrants take away native-born people's jobs. Still, there is a long tradition of blaming and punishing migrants for America's domestic problems, says Amy Hsin, a sociology professor at Queens College who has interviewed Chinese people who crossed the border before the current surge.

"During the Great Depression, it was Mexican migrants [who] were blamed and there was a period of mass deportation as a result," Hsin said. "During the gold rush, the influx of Chinese migrants was what drove the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act," an 1882 law that banned immigration of Chinese laborers and barred those living here from becoming citizens.

All this heated political rhetoric feeds into a worst-case scenario that Jian has been turning over in his head. He feels safe in America, but that safety is conditional.

"If war breaks out between China and the U.S.," he said, "just like the Japanese Americans in the second World War, people of Chinese descent could end up in a concentration camp."

To avert that, he said, "we will have to prove that we are on the side of the free world."