Donald Trump has absurdly portrayed Chinese immigrants entering the United States through Mexico as agents of the Chinese government. Scholar Elaine Sio-ieng Hui’s interviews with these migrants suggests that the exact opposite is true.
Donald Trump’s short attention span has a tendency to flit from one issue to the next. But shrewd and shameless use of nationalist politics and xenophobia has been central to and a constant of his pitch since his first campaign. One recent major target: Chinese immigrants.
Since the pandemic, tens of thousands of Chinese people have fled their country and entered the United States through the southern border without authorization. There is even a name for this phenomenon: zouxian (Chinese for “walk the route/line”), referring to Chinese people embarking on an immigration route starting in Ecuador and traveling north to Mexico to cross the border to the US. It’s a new wave of Chinese immigration driven by difficulties in applying for a US visa during the pandemic, escalating political repression, implementation of draconian COVID-19 lockdown policies, and slow economic recovery in China, as well as easy access to online information about zouxian.
Predictably, Trump and his allies have spread rumors that the zouxian immigrants are spies or drug smugglers sent by the Chinese government to harm American society, and that they are part of an attempt to establish a Chinese army within the United States. Like the rumors about pet-eating Haitians, these claims are baseless. Once he takes office, Trump has vowed to declare a national emergency and deploy the military to deport unauthorized immigrants. According to news reports, undocumented Chinese immigrants of military age will be the first group targeted for deportation by the Trump administration.
Trump’s rhetoric on US-China relations is characterized by a simple, binary logic: China and the US are polar opposites; the former evil and cunning, the latter good and righteous. The Chinese people are the same as the Chinese party-state; workers, trade unions, civil society groups, capitalists, and business associations from both countries don’t exist. Since the Chinese party-state is evil, the zouxian Chinese immigrants must have been sent by their government — likely on a military mission — and thus are evil too.
The absurdities here should be obvious. It is erroneous to equate the Chinese immigrants with the authoritarian Chinese party-state, just like it would have been wrong to equate all South Koreans, Brazilians, or Chileans with the dictatorships that they eventually overthrew — not to mention wrong to equate all Americans with Trump (or Joe Biden, for that matter).
The number of Chinese immigrants crossing the southern border has indeed increased rapidly. But overall, they are a small fraction of the total number of unauthorized immigrants entering the United States. In 2023, a record 2.5 million undocumented immigrants were detained at the US-Mexican border; only about 37,000 of them were Chinese. The numbers in 2024 are lower as the Biden administration has cracked down on the border. But such facts have never stopped Trump from fearmongering around immigration before.
Chinese Immigrants as Political Victims
According to many news reports and over two dozen interviews conducted by me and my collaborator in an ongoing research project on the recent wave of Chinese immigration into the United States, the zouxian immigrants are very unlikely fulfilling any state-assigned missions. They put their lives at stake and leave their families behind in China, to get to Ecuador, then go through Colombia, cross the life-threatening Darién Gap, then pass through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. Eventually, they arrive in Mexico to cross the border to the US. Along the way, they fight nature, exhaustion, and hunger and face constant threats imposed by gangsters and police.
Serving the Chinese party-state is not what motivates them to brave these risks. In reality, it is the opposite. The zouxian immigrants are attempting to escape from a politically repressive society and the problems such repression has generated.
Since Xi Jinping took power in 2013, China has witnessed tightening political and social repression. Xi repealed presidential term limits, centralized political power in his hands, and closed down space for social organizations. Hundreds of feminist activists, human rights lawyers, labor nongovernmental organization activists, and worker activists were arrested and repressed in the latter half of the 2010s. Then came the global pandemic, which the party-state used as an excuse to implement prolonged, draconian, and inhumane lockdown policies. This was when the current wave of Chinese immigration began.
Many Chinese immigrants, including social and political activists, fled China to pursue political freedom and a better livelihood. Some Chinese immigrants I have talked to expressed that their desperation to escape from authoritarianism trumped their fear of death along the zouxian route. Even though they are outside the country now, their families and friends in China are constantly interrogated and monitored by the police. The new wave of Chinese immigration is politically driven, as many Chinese arrivals have applied for asylum.
Rights to Asylum Seeking
There have been at least three waves of Chinese immigration to the United States. The first wave lasted from the 1850s to the 1880s. Chinese immigrants, mostly working class, were drawn to the US by the California gold rush. This wave was ended by the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (which was only repealed in 1943).
The second wave was from the late 1970s to 2019. Following the enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, restriction on migration from non-European countries was eased. Authorized Chinese immigrants during this period were a relatively well-educated, skilled labor force, and with a better-off family background. But some middle-class and working-class Chinese had managed to come to the United States through unauthorized means too.
The current wave of Chinese immigration through zouxian is the third wave. According to US Customs and Border Protection, from 2022 to today, over 66,000 unauthorized Chinese immigrants have crossed the southern border. This immigration is of a political nature: many of the immigrants left the country because of political threats or pursuit of political, religious, and individual freedom. And many use this political frame to explain their zouxian effort.
Some people I interviewed were put in jail in China because of political and social activism; after release, they were constantly being monitored by the police. Some other interviewees were not directly persecuted but found the political repression in the country suffocating, and they could not speak their minds in public or on online platforms without worrying of arrest.
After crossing the US border, a majority of the Chinese immigrants apply for asylum. Their right to seek asylum in the United States is protected by federal law. And their right to seek safety from persecution is also protected by the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, of which the US is a signatory. If the incoming Trump administration deported the Chinese immigrants (or those from other countries) with ongoing asylum-seeking cases, as Trump has suggested he will do, it would severely violate their rights and these laws.
Transcending the Binary Logic
The United States has a long history of anti-immigrant politics: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1924, Operation Wetback during the 1950s, and escalating state efforts in tightening immigration laws in recent years. Though immigrants have contributed to the US economy significantly and have lower crime rates than US citizens, they are often scapegoated for economic and social problems in the country.
Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are rooted in the binary “US vs. China” narrative, as well as in the “Us vs. Them” frame regarding immigrants from all other countries. There’s no room in this cartoonishly anti-immigrant framing for dissidents resisting an authoritarian system through migration, nor a class politics examining the plights of middle and working classes caused by economic and political elites. That, after all, is the last thing Trump wants to talk about.