U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s San Diego sector has reported a dramatic increase in the number of illegal immigrants from China entering the United States though San Diego in recent years. Border Patrol agents in that sector apprehended an estimated 663 illegal aliens from China between October and May. This compares with 48 Chinese nationals apprehended for illegal entry during the last fiscal year, five in fiscal 2014, and eight in fiscal 2013. These figures were provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and cited in a report from the San Diego Union Tribune.
Before those dates, “We just weren’t getting [Chinese nationals],” the Union Tribune quoted Wendi Lee, a spokeswoman for the Border Patrol.
Lee said criminal organizations involved find that smuggling Chinese nationals is lucrative, often charging tens of thousands of dollars to bring in each illegal alien.
“We’re talking anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000 per person,” said Lee. “The further you travel from, the more arrangements these criminal organizations have to make, the more expensive it will get.”
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The report in the Union Tribune noted that the Chinese account for the fifth-largest population of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, citing an October report by the Migration Policy Institute.
There were an estimated 285,000 illegal Chinese aliens residing in the United States in 2013.
The report concluded by observing that while fewer people are immigrating to the United States from Mexico, there are a growing number of people emigrating from Asian nations such as China and India.
We reported similar findings in our article last August, in which we cited a report released in May 2015 by Eric Jensen, a statistician/demographer with the Census Bureau’s Population Division.
The changes occurred in 2009, when immigrants identifying as non-Hispanic, Asian alone (34.7 percent) first exceeded those of Hispanic origin (30.1 percent). By 2013, the percentage of non-Hispanic, Asian alone immigrants had increased to 40.2 percent of the total, while the percentage of Hispanics had dropped to 25.5 percent.
The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) for 2013 indicated that after China, which sent 147,000 immigrants to the United States, India had moved into second place, with 129,000 immigrants to the States, with Mexico sending 125,000 immigrants.
However, those figures include both legal and illegal migrants, so it is still possible that the figures for Mexico (from which it is far easier to cross the border illegally than it is to come here illegally from across the Pacific) are underreported.
Most of the migration from Asia is the result of people from China or India coming to the United States on student or work visas and afterwards obtaining permanent resident status.
However, a newer phenomenon — the practice of “maternity tourism” by Chinese women coming to the United States on tourist visas, and then having babies in America so that their children will obtain U.S. citizenship — has also been reported in the news more often in the past few years.
We noted in last year’s article that Asians with the financial resources to fly across the Pacific to the United States have more likely complied with U.S. immigration law than their counterparts from south of the border. But the increase in illegal migration from China suggests that there are also growing numbers of affluent people from that nation who, for whatever reason, have elected the illegal path to enter the United States. Considering that China is a communist nation with more than a billion people, this represents a serious security threat to our nation that must be addressed immediately.
Very few Chinese people have the resources to spend $50,000 to $70,000 to go to the United States, so there is a strong possibility that many of these illegal aliens are Chinese espionage agents financed by their communist government.
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