For years, the United States has accused China of foot-dragging in accepting Chinese deportees found to be in the United States illegally. But that long-standing dispute may finally be resolved after Beijing allowed the United States to fly home hundreds of Chinese nationals this June. There are signs that more deportation flights could be in the works.
At a time when Washington and Beijing are locked in fierce strategic competition, the resumption of cooperation on deportation is a case study on how these two powers can find ways to address pain points in bilateral relations.
The U.S. presidential race might become another turning point and trigger a wave of deportations of Chinese migrants, if the former President Donald Trump—the Republican Party’s nominee—gets his way. At the very least, a Trump win would inject new uncertainty into the process following his pledge to start “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
The deportation flights came amid a historic wave of Chinese migrants crossing into the United States at the southern border. Driven by an economic downturn at home and the traumatic fallout of COVID-19 lockdowns as well as mounting political repression, tens of thousands of Chinese nationals have joined the zouxian (“walk the route”) movement to leave the country, according to interviews with the migrants.
For decades, China’s wealthy and well-educated have immigrated to the United States legally through investment or employment visas, or simply by sending their children to study there in hopes of getting sponsored for citizenship one day.
But for less well-off migrants, the latest route largely entails flying into select South America countries that offer visa-free entry to Chinese, traversing the treacherous jungle through the Darién Gap between the Colombia-Panama border, and crossing a host of Central American countries before finally presenting themselves to U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas or California.
More than 24,000 Chinese migrants illegally crossed the U.S. southern border during the 2023 fiscal year, according to government data, compared to fewer than 15,000 Chinese migrants in the previous 10 years combined.
For the leaders in Beijing, the optics of tens of thousands of people leaving has been embarrassing. At the height of COVID-19 lockdowns in China, internet searches about runxue, which roughly translates to “the art of running away,” skyrocketed on social media. The zouxian movement is part of that trend, as people have resorted to increasingly desperate measures to leave the country. In recent months, there have been signs that Beijing has tightened censorship on these topics.
“The recent exodus severely harmed China’s global image,” said Gao Guangjun, a New York-based lawyer who has represented Chinese immigrants for years. “Beijing wants to deter this trend by creating an impression that these migrants are easily deportable.”
The official statement by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not specify how many Chinese nationals were deported on the June flight, though the agency later confirmed to the media that there were 116 of them. The Wall Street Journal reported that the flight departed from Texas and landed at the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang.
“I don’t think undocumented Chinese immigration is discussed a lot in immigration debates,” said Amy Hsin, a professor of sociology at Queens College at the City University of New York. Such deportation flights thus provide “good photo opportunities for governments wishing to show strength and progress in their dealings with migration,” she added.
The spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., Liu Pengyu, said in an emailed statement that the authorities have repatriated the “planners and organizers of smuggling activities and illegal immigrants to their original places of residence.”
China is one of more than a dozen countries that are considered “recalcitrant” by U.S. authorities for a systematic lack of cooperation with their deportation efforts. In fact, this issue has been the subject of one of the longest-running negotiations on law enforcement cooperation between the two countries.
For years, Beijing has viewed the delay as a bargaining chip to pressure the United States to return Chinese nationals who were actually wanted by the authorities, but Washington has spurned such deals out of its obligations to international law, according to Safeguard Defenders, a human rights organization. Beijing wants dissidents—and sometimes genuinely corrupt officials—returned; Washington wants to deport ordinary economic migrants who entered the United States illegally.
“Durable progress is only possible when both sides’ concerns are being addressed,” said Ryan Hass, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.
He suggested that cooperation on deportation should be viewed in conjunction with other areas of law enforcement cooperation, including Washington’s goal of countering the flow of fentanyl precursors from China, which has fueled a deadly opioid epidemic in the United States.
For undocumented Chinese migrants to be deported from the United States, they need valid travel documents, such as a current passport, which many migrants may not keep out of fear of deportation. The Chinese government has also cited the time-consuming need to verify the citizenship of these migrants as another reason for the delay.
As a result, the backlog has become massive over the years. About 100,000 Chinese migrants living in the United States were subjected to final orders of removal as of November 2023, the New York Times reported at the time.
“One plane with 100 people is a very small drop in the bucket,” said Gary Chodorow, a U.S. immigration lawyer with decades of experience representing Chinese clients. “But any administration is going to want to remove people with a final order of deportation. The question is how strong and forceful the administration is willing to do that,” he added.
Meanwhile, there are already signs that the recent deportations have created unintended consequences. Sam, a Chinese migrant in his 40s who crossed the U.S. southern border with his teenage son last year and asked to be identified only by his English name, said that some other migrants in his community in New York told him that they decided to stop reporting to U.S. immigration authorities following reports of the deportation flight.
“They too are afraid of getting deported as part of the transactions between the U.S. and China,” Sam said.
It’s not entirely clear what could happen to these deportees once they are returned to China, but media reports suggested that they could be subject to fines, detention, exit bans, and the confiscation of their passports.
Although the number of Chinese migrant crossings still pale in comparison with the millions of Latin Americans who have made such perilous journeys in recent years, the trend still alarmed policymakers in Washington.
Trump suggested at a campaign rally in April that these Chinese migrants could try to “build a little army” in the United States, drawing on existing far-right rhetoric about a supposed wave of “military-aged” Chinese immigrants. A month later, a U.S. congressional subcommittee held a hearing on what it called the “unprecedented surge” in Chinese illegal migration, and many Republicans in the House of Representatives expressed concerns that a large influx of migrants from a major geopolitical rival could undermine U.S. national security.
“Most of the foreign-policy establishment is completely wrong on this issue,” said Gil Guerra, an immigration policy analyst at Niskanen Center, a bipartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. “They are entirely buying into the theory that this is a security risk without all the evidence.”
Then there’s the added shock value. Although Chinese migrants have been known to have been crossing into the United States from Mexico for decades, their movements were far less organized and noticeable compared to the latest wave, which has been fueled by social media and vast smuggling networks, experts say.
And the negotiations surrounding deportation have coincided with a gradual thaw in U.S.-China relations since last November, when U.S. President Joe Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in California.
This April, Washington was reportedly conducting high-level discussions with China aimed at increasing the number of Chinese nationals to be deported, according to NBC News. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he had raised the issue with his Chinese counterpart, Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong, earlier this year at a meeting in Vienna.
By May, Washington and Beijing had “quietly” resumed cooperation on such deportations, The Associated Press reported, though it’s unclear precisely when it resumed. Mayorkas and Wang held another video call in early June, and Wang listed “repatriating illegal immigrants” as one of the areas to deepen bilateral law enforcement cooperation.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about the negotiation process.
“To me, it’s kind of a political show, a gesture that the Chinese government is trying to deal with this issue too,” said Min Zhou, a professor of sociology and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“In fact, neither government can effectively curb migration unless something is done to the intermediaries and the larger economic situation,” she added, referring to the brokers and smugglers in this business.
Other experts echoed her views that the recent U.S.-China cooperation on deportation is driven by political expediency—which means that it could be short-lived, as Trump has vowed to get even tougher on China if reelected.
“The U.S and China hammered out an agreement out of mutual benefits,” said Gao, the immigration lawyer based in New York. “If the rivalry between the two sides intensifies, law enforcement cooperation will be the first to go.”
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