Lihua Wu’s journey to the United States started when she scrolled past the words “The Route”, one of several common hashtags on Douyin, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok, advising migrants on the irregular overland trek across Latin America to the United States, also known online as “the Big Beautiful.”
By the time the single mother and her five-year-old daughter were apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol on a dirt road near the U.S.-Mexico border just before midnight on April 2, Wu said she had relied on social media for detailed instructions for her trip, including footwear (Crocs as well as hiking boots) and how to find and pay for a reliable local guide.
The difficulty of obtaining U.S. visas and the economic after-shocks of China’s COVID lockdowns have led to a sharp increase in Chinese nationals presenting at the U.S.-Mexico border – and some of those arrivals, like Wu, learned about how to come online, migrants, immigration experts, attorneys, and current and former U.S. officials, told Reuters.
Over the course of three weeks photographing and reporting from a remote border stretch in southeastern Texas, Reuters witnessed hundreds of Chinese migrants crossing into the United States and interviewed more than two dozen in Mandarin.
All of those interviewed said they got the idea to take the land route to the United States on social media and drew on influencers, private groups, and comments to plan their trips.
About half said they had been small business owners in China: running online stores, a sheep farm, and a movie production company.
Some wore crosses and carried Chinese-language Bibles, saying they were Christians who felt they could not freely practice their religion at home. China’s constitution guarantees religious freedom, but in recent years critics including the U.S. government say Beijing has tightened restrictions on religions seen as a challenge to the authority of the ruling Communist party.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington said in an email that the government opposes illegal migration, which “is an international issue that requires cooperation between countries.” It did not respond to a request for comment on the issue of religious freedom.
Short video app Douyin, owned by TikTok owner ByteDance, is one of the main sources of the Chinese tech giant’s revenue overall, Reuters previously reported. ByteDance, which also owns Xigua Video, did not respond to requests for comments.
Apprehensions of Chinese nationals at the U.S.-Mexico border reached more than 6,500 in the six months since October 2022, the highest on record and a more than 15-fold increase over the same period a year ago, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.
While just a sliver of the hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving at the southwest border, Chinese people were the fastest-growing demographic in those six months, CBP data show.
In a March 16 tweet, CBP Chief Border Patrol Agent Gloria Chavez in the Rio Grande Valley sector that includes Fronton said the increase was “creating a strain on our workforce due to the complexities of the language barrier & lengthens the processing.”
CBP said in a statement that it works with inter-agency task forces to track increasing migration and target “transnational criminal organizations who are smuggling Chinese migrants, specifically.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, has said that social media and other online platforms have increased smugglers’ access to potential migrants, creating an environment ripe for manipulation, which the agency has tried to combat with social media campaigns.
Even before her business collapsed, Wu said she had considered emigration as an escape from the discrimination she said she experienced as an unmarried single mother. Her decision to leave China solidified during a COVID-related lockdown in October, November, and December, which devastated the online makeup wholesaler she ran from the eastern city of Yiwu.
When COVID controls curbed package deliveries in China, Wu said her sales slumped from around six million yuan ($871,000) to one million yuan ($145,000).
Wu initially thought about getting a U.S. tourist visa and overstaying, but a travel agent advised she was unlikely to get a visa as a single mother.
Refusal rates among Chinese nationals for the most common U.S. visitor visas reached 80% in fiscal year 2021 and more than 30% in 2022, the two highest years on record, according to State Department data. While U.S. visa issuance globally has mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels, the number of U.S. visas issued from China last year remained 90% below 2019’s pre-pandemic levels.
Visa holders and border crossers can request U.S. asylum on arrival if they fear persecution at home. Asylum seekers from China won in U.S. immigration court 58% of the time, according to U.S. Justice Department data.
The State Department in an emailed statement said 2021 and 2022 “were not standard years.” It said visa issuances were expected to increase as China “catches up on its passport backlog and air travel resumes after the end of the zero-COVID policy.”
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Source: Reuters
