The fastest growing group among illegal immigrants to the United States comes from China.
According to CBS News, many Chinese migrants found step-by-step instructions for hiring smugglers on TikTok, the social media platform that comes from China. Some migrants flew from China to Ecuador, which doesn’t require a visa for Chinese nationals, before they flew to Tijuana. There, they met smugglers and paid them each $400 to drive to a border fence 60 miles east of San Diego where there is a 4-foot gap.
“I come from Yugoslavia. And I left Yugoslavia, I went to Austria. I stayed there eight month. And I knock on this door. I didn’t bust the door down to come over here,” Jerry Shuster, on whose land the gap exists, told CBS News. “I came through the front door.”
“It was, like, four month ago, there was eight guys start– knocking my trees and start burning my– my– my trees on the other side. So I told ’em, ‘Please, don’t do that. Please don’t do—’ and they start surrounding me. I went home, and I got my gun, and I shoot in the air. They arrest me,” he recalled. “ … on my property. Yeah, just because. I ask ’em not to burn the trees, not to knock the fences. And they– they arrested me. They put me in a police car. I’m just protecting my own land.”
Asked how many migrants he thought he had seen come through his property, Shuster replied, “Maybe 3,000 a week.”
The Department of Justice admits that in 2023, 55% of Chinese migrants gained asylum as opposed to 14% for every other nationality.
More than 24,000 Chinese citizens were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in the past year, a number higher than the combined data on apprehensions from the ten previous years, according to a New York Times report in November. Texas officials have disseminated figures showing cartels charging individuals from China $35,000 to $50,000 a person to be smuggled into the United States.
As many as 10.5 million illegal immigrants were living in the United States in 2021, according to a report in November by the Pew Research Center, which observed the figure to be a “modest” increase over the population in 2019 and “nearly identical” to the number in 2017.
Data gleaned from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows at least 36,000 Chinese have been ordered by U.S. courts to exit the United States, CBS News reported.
Daniel Chaitin contributed to this article.