CNN’s Culver: Number of Illegal Chinese Migrants in ’23 Nearly Doubled Past Decade’s Total, Most Economic Migrants

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” CNN Correspondent David Culver reported on the massive surge of Chinese migrants coming to the U.S., and said the migrants that he spoke to are mostly coming for economic reasons and end up waiting around the border “expecting Border Patrol to pick them up.”

Culver began the report by stating that “The numbers reflect the surge. From 2013 to 2022, CBP recorded fewer than 16,000 Chinese migrants illegally crossing the U.S. southern border. This past year alone, more than 31,000. That’s roughly double the prior ten years combined.”

Culver said that the migrants they tracked “end up where we started, San Diego County, burning fires through the night to keep warm, and during the day, expecting Border Patrol to pick them up.”

Culver also reported that a Chinese migrant who came to the U.S. for economic reasons who he spoke to “crossed into the U.S. and is waiting to be processed for asylum, joining the thousands who have crossed before him and the many more to come.”

After the report, Culver talked about the report with host Jake Tapper and said, “So, we met folks down there, Jake, in San Diego County. And a lot of them were telling us it was for persecution’s sake, they were Christians, they were Muslims, they were Buddhists. The vast majority, though, economic reasons.”

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