What's behind the Chinese migrant surge at the Darien Gap?
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Get a free bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey when you subscribe to The Spectator in our Black Friday sale. Go to spectator.co.uk forward slash Friday. Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How did the Chinese see these issues?

Darien Gap is a 60-mile stretch of jungle that hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over South America trek through in order to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. From there, they enter America illegally in search of better lives. These are usually migrants from Venezuela or Colombia or Panama. But in recent years, a new group of people have appeared at the border, having paid people smugglers and hacked through the jungle themselves.

They often bring young children, clutch onto smartphones with which they check their routes and check social media videos that set out, step by step, the journey they are embarking on. These are the Chinese, which in the last two years have been the fastest growing group of migrants being encountered at America's southern border. Over 37,000 last year, up from just under 4,000 the year before. This year there have already been 21,000. What brings them? And how unusual is this method of emigration when it comes to people from China?

I'm joined today by Professor Meredith Oyen, an expert on US-China migration, and Amy Hawkins, senior China correspondent at The Guardian, who has come across a similar phenomenon on Europe's borders. Meredith and Amy, welcome to Chinese Whispers. Now, Meredith, let's start with the Darien Gap. Tell us about this new group of migrants.

Starting in really late 2022 and early 2023, there was a noticeably significant rise in the number of Chinese migrants who've been following that route. And it's happening in part because of the fact that Chinese nationals could fly visa-free into Ecuador.

And so that gave them a route into the Americas. And then there is this well-established route for migration that's for migrants from especially Venezuela and Colombia coming through the Darien Gap and coming up through Central America and Mexico to cross the U.S. border. And when you say there's been a significant increase in numbers, can you give us an idea of just how significant that increase is?

Yeah, it used to be that there would be maybe a couple hundred Chinese migrants crossing the U.S. southern border and in any given sort of month and then or year. And then it grew to over the course of the year, it was thirty seven thousand. And so it was, you know, an order of magnitude greater. So it's still a small number compared to the overall number of migrants who are crossing the U.S. southern border. But it was a exponential increase in the number of Chinese migrants.

And Amy, you've not been to the Darien Gap, but you reported from Eastern Europe recently where you saw something similar but smaller going on. Tell us about that. Yeah, so I was in Bosnia recently, kind of looking into a similar phenomenon and found

in part because there have been these huge numbers of Chinese people trying to cross into the US via the southern border, but starting in Ecuador. And then in June or July this year, Ecuador cancelled its visa-free arrangement with China, meaning that that route is no longer so easy. And, you know, people who want to emigrate from China will still try and find other routes. And so we've been, I've been looking at the kind of migration statistics of various countries and, you

you know, seeing that, again, it's quite a well-trodden path in the Balkans for migrants from all different countries to get into the European Union because you have Croatia there, which borders Bosnia, but Croatia is an EU country. So there's this quite well-trodden migration route for people from typically the Middle East and Northern Africa and increasingly very small, but increasing numbers of Chinese people are showing up on that route. And, yeah,

I mean, as Meredith said, in the overall scale of the numbers of people doing this route, it's still quite small, but the scale of increase has been really dramatic. And on the Bosnia-Croatia border alone, I think it was in 2022, two people were caught trying to cross the border from Bosnia into the EU. And last year, it was nearly 150. So the scale of increase is still quite remarkable.

And of course, the big question is, why is this happening now? And the related question is, who are these people? Because China is no stranger to people leaving the country, you know, the Chinese diaspora, a number some 50, I think it's 50 million across the world. And often people do go by illegal routes, previously used to be smuggling on the back of lorries, for example, into countries like the UK, and often from coastal areas in China, like Fujian. But

But this time it feels like something different because one thing that strikes me, for example, is the fact that a lot of these people seem to have a middle class background. Meredith? Yeah. In the case of the US southern border, the overwhelming number of migrants do seem to be sort of middle class and they're coming in the wake of the end of the zero COVID policy.

And so they're reacting to a combination of the impact of the pandemic on the economy, the impact of the pandemic, especially on small business owners and people who had particular economic interests that were hurt by that, by economic policies. And

the sort of increasingly difficult environment, political environment in China under Xi Jinping. And so they are reacting to that as well. So it's like a combination of economic issues and political repression is driving more and more people to say, let's find a route to the United States. And so the combination of, you know, trying to

get visas and get exit permits. And there's all kinds of mechanics that are necessary to try and migrate internationally. And for a period of time there until the end of the Ecuador visa-free movement, this was one of the easier paths. It sounds silly to call it easy, but it was one of the more visible and legible paths for how to try and cross the border.

Right, because I mean, you know, these people are getting advice on social media on various Chinese platforms where there'll be short videos telling them who to pay, how much to pay, what route to follow. And some of these kind of smugglers even book them hotels, I think, at least certainly on the American borders. Amy, I don't know if the route is established in Europe yet.

Yeah, I mean, the route itself is very well established in that there are people smugglers along the route who will try and facilitate crossing into Croatia for a fee. And the fee is not low, is it? The fee can be, you know, thousands of euros or dollars. Yeah, exactly. And as Meredith said, I think a lot of these Chinese migrants are coming from relatively...

more well-off backgrounds than the other migrants on the route, but probably, you know, a lower socioeconomic class than other Chinese emigrants because, you know, lots of wealthier Chinese people will emigrate through work or study visas or investment opportunities. So the people on these kind of more dangerous routes...

are relatively wealthy compared to the other people on the route, but, you know, less wealthy than other Chinese people. But then that means that they are able to, if they, you know, often pay higher fees for people smugglers, if that's what they choose to do. I mean, actually, when I was in Bosnia, the Chinese people I met hadn't tried to use people smugglers, I think in part because of a lack of information. So, like, they, I mean, there were these adverts for people smugglers I saw in Bosnia where they were, they started advertising themselves in Chinese as well as in English.

kind of Arabic and other languages. But in general, I think the information ecosystem for the Chinese migrants, beyond like some groups on Telegram where they can exchange tips, isn't as well established. I know with the southern, the American route, you know, there are lots of videos on Douyin or Xiaohongshu, these Chinese social media apps, but

It seemed to me that these are people I met in Bosnia. They were sort of going into it a bit more blindly and were literally kind of looking at Google Maps and saying, OK, look, I look like I can cross here. And so they were, you know, slightly the route is very well trodden, but they weren't the most expert people at navigating it.

And Amy, who were they? Who were the people that you spoke to? What jobs did they do in China? What was the final trigger for them? Were they bringing their own families? Can you tell us a bit more about who these people that you met were? Yeah, so I went kind of expecting to meet people who were leaving China, maybe primarily for economic reasons, because that's what I'd read a lot of the reporting from what's going on in the Darien Gap, people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the pandemic and China's economic growth is slowing.

And the people I met, that was definitely part of it, but actually maybe I was slightly surprised to the extent to which the political reasons and the crackdown on freedom of speech and civil society, which has intensified in the past few years, the extent to which that was a motivating factor. So one guy I spoke to said,

He was from Shandong province and he actually had had quite a stable, you know, middle income job working like as an administrator for a private company. He had two children, you know, by some measures he had an office job. Yeah, he just had an office job. He had quite a stable life.

But for him, he felt like he was, you know, he'd been critical of the government both privately and publicly among his circle of friends for years. In 2012, he had been briefly detained for comments he'd made on social media. He was then released. But then he said, you know, after zero COVID, he'd attended some of the protests in 2022, the white paper protests.

and was scared of being arrested again. And he really felt, I mean, according to him, it was for the sake of his children that he wanted to make this difficult journey. So he brought two young children with him. And he said, you know, they just have no future in China. And even though he like now recognised that the path he was forging in Europe was incredibly difficult, and he didn't really have a, he hadn't made it across out of Bosnia, he hadn't made it into the EU yet.

But he felt like the lack of kind of political freedom and freedom of speech in China was just becoming more and more oppressive. And he just wanted his children to grow up somewhere else. Hmm.

Meredith, is that similar to the situation on the American border as well? Yes. I mean, there's clearly lots of economic motivations, but there's also a lot of talk about political motivations. And those are actually important because those are more likely to be granted an asylum. If you're making an asylum claim on political motivations, you're much more likely to be granted an asylum.

more likely to be granted asylum. And historically, and even through this period of this migration, Chinese migrants have had a much higher success rate of being granted asylum in the United States, much more than any of the migrants who are from the Americas. So they have a higher

success rate than, say, Venezuelan or Colombian migrants who are also taking this path. And so the concept of political... Because of the political situation in China, is that why? Right. For example, the political situation in Venezuela has caused a lot of people to try and leave for political reasons, but they have a much harder time getting the asylum decision from US authorities than the Chinese do. And that's partly because of US-China relations and the sort of the

the tensions between the two countries that make American officials more easily persuaded that the Chinese government is particularly harsh and

would be something that somebody would need to be saved from. In one report that I saw, there was one of these migrants going through the Darien Gap who'd surrendered himself because that's what they do, isn't it? Once they make it into the US, they surrender themselves to the border police and then they can claim asylum that way. So it's not like they're trying to eke out a living, or at least maybe some of them are, but most of them do surrender themselves and try to put themselves in the system.

One of them I saw had this kind of diamond studded cross on his neck and the Chinese translation of the Bible. And my perhaps unkind first thought was, this is a very smart way to get asylum if you claim that you're a Christian and apply that way. And I'm not saying that he is doing that, but just for a demographic that's about 3% of the Chinese society.

I did have an unkind thought of how much of this was claiming, because playing into the US-China relationship right now, and then using that as a way to, you know, get a better life. And obviously, you wouldn't do this without good reason, especially if you're taking your kids through here. But it might just be that the American authorities don't think that your economic motivations are good enough. I don't know, Meredith.

Right. Yeah. I mean, economic motivations are not grounds for asylum under U.S. immigration law. The problem with it, though, is that the asylum system, like the process of actually getting asylum requires quite a lot of documentation and it requires, you know, a lot of expert witnesses who can affirm the kinds of things that you're afraid of. And so, you know, if you're trying to fake your way into asylum, your odds aren't super great. Right. Right.

But there is a huge backlog in asylum cases and a huge backlog of cases to be adjudicated in the U.S. immigration court system.

And because of that, you can wait 10 years for an opportunity to argue your case. And if that's the case, you have 10 years where you're living and establishing yourself in the United States. And even then, if the decision is adverse to you, if it says, you know, you're ordered deported, you are not granted asylum, deportation to China from the United States is very difficult.

And why is that?

But the large scale flights are like, you know, 100 people. They're not they don't touch the many thousands of Chinese who are in the United States on unauthorized terms or who are waiting for adjudication or who are under orders of deportation. And so the idea of sort of a mass deportation of all Chinese back to China is almost impossible. And so chances are, even if, you know, it's not ideal to live somewhere without legal status and under an order of deportation, that's a very difficult life.

But for most people, they probably won't ever be deported. Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting comparison with the US compared to Europe, because as Meredith said, you know, Chinese asylum seekers have quite a high rate of success when it comes to claiming asylum in the US, in part because of, you know, the US-China relationship, perceptions of China in the US. But actually, at least in the UK, the UK asylum system was not very familiar with applications from Chinese people. And

Chinese people have quite a hard time claiming asylum in the UK. I mean, the numbers aren't even that big at the moment of the people who managed to get to the UK, but more have got to Germany and the Netherlands and Northern Europe. But the perception here is kind of, you know, these people are coming from the second biggest economy in the world, you know, in China, the superpower, and particularly these people who...

have come from, you know, relatively stable backgrounds. Maybe they'll make the case that they weren't leaving for economic reasons, they're leaving for political reasons. But without evidence of that persecution, it's just really, really hard to make the claim. So, you know, some people I met in Bosnia, they had, you know, Chinese court documents and judgments that, you know, show that they'd be imprisoned for things like picking quarrels and provoking trouble, which is a kind of a classic example.

charge used against people who post things online that the government doesn't like. So, you know, there are some people who can show, hey, look, I've been imprisoned for comments I made online. But for other people, you know, they hadn't brought the relevant paperwork with them, again, because of this kind of information vacuum as well. The people I met in, you

it didn't really seem like they had a really clear plan of what they were going to do when they got there it was more just like we're going to get in they know about this you know Schengen area you know you can free movement once you're in the EU and it was sort of kind of I'll figure it out when I get there but they may not even be applying for asylum they may be intending to work or you know just find a way to settle in and um

It was kind of less a case of I'm going to declare myself to the authorities and they will accept my asylum claim, which I think is maybe more prominent in what's happening in the U.S.

And I suppose from the Chinese side, the attitude perhaps is they'd rather not talk about this as a phenomenon at all, because it's not exactly a vote of confidence for tens of thousands of people to be so desperate to leave the country because of economic or political or religious reasons that they're putting themselves into the kind of danger of people fleeing war to all countries. What has been the government's response to it?

Initially, I think there wasn't much of a response because there's been sort of historically longer term, these kinds of migrations, there's sort of a acceptance that, you know, people who are so desperate to leave, you know, good riddance. And so there's not always been a big backlash, especially these numbers are not big, right? In terms of either the number of people coming into the U.S. or the number of people in China or the number of people leaving China, the numbers are not particularly big crossing the U.S. southern border. Right.

But there's been increasing backlash and increasing cooperation from the Chinese government to try and stem the tide of this. And some of that has to do with the U.S. political system and the way that the sort of anti-Chinese policies

Right.

entering the U.S. without authorization must be doing so because the communists sent them to undermine us, you know, that sort of thing. And so that rhetoric drew the attention of the Chinese embassy in the U.S., which then pushed back quite forcefully against it. And then China did sort of step up and negotiate and also put pressure, as the United States put pressure on Ecuador to end the visa-free entry. Mm-hmm.

and did agree to these negotiations to start deportations to sort of eliminate that incentive, like the assumption that you'll just never be deported. Like, let's nix that and make sure that it's clear. There's definitely been efforts now in the last six months, especially to try and stem the tide from the Chinese government side. And do you think, Meredith, going forward then in 2024, at least the second half or even 2025,

We're going to be seeing a different story because, as you say, Trump has been elected. This visa-free travel to Ecuador has been ended. The government in China is caring more about this. So is this a bit of a pandemic phenomenon with a long tail that is actually now going to be stemmed? It's already way down. And that has to do with, in addition to all the factors we mentioned about Ecuador and everything else, President Biden had changed the asylum rules within executive orders.

And so that said that, you know, they would limit the number of people who could do this sort of cross the border and claim asylum. And the limits that they put on are quite strict. And so they've already sort of crushed the population, created a much smaller number of people who are attempting to make the trip.

And then there's increasing efforts to cooperate with countries like Honduras and Guatemala and Mexico to try and prevent people from crossing through those territories. And so there's the numbers are already much lower. There is no law, policy, action invented that I think can stop people from migrating who are determined to migrate. There's always going to be some number of people who try and come, but the numbers are going to be low.

And once you see President Trump take office, he ran immigration was a big issue in the campaign. He claims that Biden basically opened up the southern border by reversing some of his policies towards asylum seekers. And so I would expect to see a very strict policy on asylum, a return to the wait in Mexico concept, which is not going to be appealing for some and will be appealing for others because there's actually a fairly decent Chinese population in Mexico. Yeah.

But there's going to be those kinds of policies that's going to make this much, much harder and take the numbers down even further, I would expect. And Amy, for us here in Europe, though, we might start seeing that coming, the same people who would have wanted to leave China, maybe coming here instead. Although at the same time, I guess the push factors in China maybe are lower as well, now that the pandemic and zero COVID as a policy is over, because so many people seem to be small business owners who just had no certainty under that pandemic control method. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, potentially, like the push factors are not as intense as they were, you know, right at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023, when zero COVID had just ended and there was all this pent up frustration. That said, though, I think given the fact that, you know, people are still trying to make the journey in, you know, the thousands, if not tens of thousands of people,

Each year, my guess is that, you know, judging by how migration flows work for other groups, normally when one route is cut off, you know, it just increases the numbers pursuing another route. And, you know, as Meredith said, it's likely going to get a lot more difficult to migrate.

crossing to the US via the southern border. And I would expect to kind of see more people trying to take the European route via the Balkans because, you know, there hasn't been like a particular focus on Chinese people on that route. And there's been this kind of ongoing issue for years about the, you know, the Croatian border police acting in

very aggressively towards any migrant trying to cross into the EU. But yet, you know, the people still keep on coming. And I would expect as that route becomes more well established within Chinese social networks as well, and more people arrive in their destination country, you know, they pass the messages back to people who then might attempt that route. And I would expect to see more people trying to get into Europe.

Well, fascinating story in development. Amy and Meredith, thank you so much for joining Chinese Whispers. No, thank you so much for having us. Thanks. That was Meredith Owen and Amy Hawkins. Since we talked, actually a number of deportation flights have taken off from the States and back into China. They've taken some hundreds of people with them. So it might be that this story was just a blip.

A brief moment when the push factors from China after the pandemic coincided with the laxness of the American border in the days before Trump returns. We now wait to see whether those people who are unable to get into the US anymore will now start coming to Europe.