More than 100,000 Chinese nationals have migrated into the United States since 2021, and the federal government is doing little to block them or to send them home, the New York Times reported on November 24.
“When [President Joe] Biden and Mr. Xi met last week during an international summit in San Francisco, for instance, immigration was absent in their discussion,” the newspaper reported:
Instead, they talked about fentanyl, American business investment in China and export controls, among other topics.
In the past, American diplomats have tried to work with the Chinese government to persuade it to repatriate its citizens, and the response has tended to be the same.
“They would just plain refuse to acknowledge the person was Chinese,” said Michele Thoren Bond, a former assistant secretary of state who worked on these issues. “It is not credible that a country that documents and monitors its citizens as closely as China does not have photos of every citizen,” Ms. Bond added.
In 2015, for example, federal officials tried to deport more than a dozen violent Chinese migrants back to their home country, Reuters reported. “But, not for the first time, China failed to provide the necessary documents, and three months later not one of those arrested has been deported, and many have been released from custody,” Reuters said.
U.S. officials do not pressure China to accept deported migrants largely because U.S. corporations and investors want to preserve their lucrative exports from China to U.S. markets.
Without China’s approval, Chinese migrants would have to be flown to a third country — and officials of both parties have done little to enable that policy.
Similarly, Biden’s officials do not pressure Mexico’s government to take back illegal migrants because they rely on Mexico to streamline the flow of worldwide economic migrants into the United States.
The failure to deport Chinese migrants is incentivizing more migrants into Americans’ workplaces and neighborhoods. Many of those migrants collect in New York, where they work illegally and help to push less productive Americans out of decent jobs and homes.
A second major attraction for Chinese migrants is that a majority of Chinese migrants are allowed to stay because they win asylum claims in court, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Many of the winners, however, are actually economic migrants who have transited through multiple safe countries to reach the United States. Those countries include Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Mexico, where migrants are allowed to ask for political asylum.
Most and Least Successful Asylum Seekers in Immigration Court–2001-2021 (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse)
There is no cap on the number of migrants who can win asylum each year.
Many Chinese migrants also arrive legally, either as temporary visa workers in the H-1B and OPT programs or as family migrants joining prior legal immigrants.
The administration is determined to enable a greater flow of migrants from China via the H-2B and H-2A programs. Those are temporary work programs, but workers from China would likely apply for asylum before they had to go home.
Many U.S. investors and CEOs welcome a larger flow of legal and illegal migrants because the migrants serve as wage-cutting workers, apartment-sharing renters, and government-aided consumers.
Most media outlets portray illegal migrants in a positive light, regardless of the pocketbook and civic damage done to ordinary Americans. The Los Angeles Times, for example, reported favorably on a family of Chinese economic migrants in July:
On this hot June afternoon, a woman who wore an ankle monitor so immigration authorities could track her said she had been “just getting by” running a small restaurant in Wuhan and wanted to escape the social stigma of being twice divorced.
“If your job and family situation aren’t good, there’s no future in China,” said the woman, 33, who had arrived in the L.A. area about a month earlier and would give only her English name, Sophia. “If I can get a work permit, if I can learn English, maybe I won’t feel as much under pressure.”
Monterey Park has long been a landing spot for immigrants from China with no English and a few hundred dollars in their pockets. “Family hotels” offer a cheap place to sleep, crammed in with dozens of others. Employment agencies can provide a gig at a restaurant, a warehouse or a marijuana farm — no work permit needed.
In September, the Center for Immigration Studies reported that officials want to expand the number of countries where H-2A and H-2B workers can be hired:
DHS proposes to remove the requirement that USCIS may generally only approve petitions for H-2 nonimmigrant status for nationals of countries that the Secretary of Homeland Security, with the concurrence of the Secretary of State, has designated as eligible to participate in the H-2 programs.
There is no cap on the number of H-2A workers who can be hired each year.
Chinese citizens wait to submit visa applications at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (MARK RALSTON/AFP/GettyImages).
Under current rules, most of the H-2A workers come from Latino countries south of Texas.
The flood of Chinese migrants is large enough to create more organized crime and more national security problems.
For example, in December 2022, a city inspector discovered a Chinese-run laboratory that stored many diseases and viruses in Reedley, California. In October 2022, federal officials arrested several Chinese government employees who were secretly policing and intimidating Chinese immigrants.
Chinese criminals are using Chinese immigrations to run a coast-to-coast drug production system with many grow sites in California and Maine:
However, there is no evidence that Biden’s progressive, pro-migration officials have used economic pressure to disrupt the drug trade from China and Mexico into the United States.