This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy on July 23, 2024.
In early July, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deported 116 Chinese nationals on a charter flight back to China—the first such instance since 2018. The move was the latest expression of increased U.S. concern over the rapid growth of illegal immigration from China in recent years.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, more than 1 million people have left China, frustrated by restrictive lockdown policies, the country’s economic downturn and bleak job prospects, and tightened political control. In China, this is often referred to in semi-coded fashion as run—a play on the Chinese word for profit, which is a homophone for the English word “run.” Although Canada, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and other countries have also seen a surge in Chinese migrants, the United States is one of their top destinations.
Most people are emigrating legally, but since January 2023, there have been more than 50,000 encounters between Chinese nationals and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the United States-Mexico border—a 1,000 percent increase compared with the combined encounters in 2022 and 2021. Although Chinese nationals have made up only 2 percent of all migrant encounters at the border since last October, the unusual uptick in migration—compounded by ongoing geopolitical tensions with China—has triggered intensified scrutiny from the media and lawmakers alike.
In some corners of the government and the national security community, a worrisome narrative about this trend has taken root: that these migrants are arriving with the intent of conducting espionage on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A January letter to Congress from former FBI, DHS, and law enforcement officials warned that illegal Chinese immigration could be part of a ploy to “devastate national infrastructure,” while Rep. Mike Ezell has said it would be “nonsense” to think that China “would not use an open border to their advantage.” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green has gone so far as to liken the migrants to the unmarked military personnel Russia used during its 2014 invasion of Crimea and described skepticism of this rhetoric as CCP “talking points.”
However, characterizing this wave of migration primarily as a security threat is not only factually incorrect—it’s also a missed opportunity for U.S. soft power in its strategic competition with China.