A Chinese migrant who crossed the US-Mexico border into California earlier this year died outside his New York apartment after a fall that led to severe brain trauma, reports the Chinese language newspaper World Journal.
The man is identified as Pan Xiaochun, from Lianjiang, Fujian Province. According to the World Journal, he entered the US in January and later made his way to a relative’s home in Pennsylvania before settling into an apartment in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, home to a burgeoning Chinese community.
That same relative received a call February 1 informing him that Pan had fallen, possibly while inebriated, outside his apartment and had been hospitalized. He died of his injuries shortly after.
Pan is among the growing number of Chinese migrants crossing into the US via its southern border with Mexico. Reporting shows that migrants from China are now among the fastest growing group amid a record surge of migrant encounters by border agents.
Reporters from 60 Minutes traveled to one location east of San Diego, where they found a hole cut into the border fence, with migrants streaming through, many of them from China. Interviews with some of the migrants found that news of the breach had been circulating via the social media platform TikTok.
Speaking through a translator, most cited China’s repressive political system and its slowing economy as reasons for their decision to leave the country.
Others described lengthy journeys across multiple countries in South and Central America and later Mexico, including passage through the notorious Darien Gap, a dangerous stretch of jungle widely used by migrants connecting Colombia and Panama.
According to statistics from Panama’s immigration department, cited by the World Journal, the number of Chinese migrants who crossed the Darien Gap from January to September last year was the fourth largest by nationality, behind Venezuela, Ecuador and Haiti.
Others said they flew directly into Mexico, paying traffickers – or snake heads, as they are known in Chinese – to drive them to the location of the hole along the border fence.
Beijing is reportedly notorious for not taking back citizens deported from the US. There are currently about 36,000 Chinese who have been ordered to return, though there is little the US can do to force Beijing’s hand.
Data from the Department of Homeland Security shows that US Border Patrol detained more than 31,000 Chinese citizens in the first eleven months of 2023, compared to an average of around just 1,500 in the decade prior. In all, some 225,000 migrants were apprehended in the first 27 days of December last year, breaking an earlier record set the previous year.
While migrants from Mexico, Central and South America continue to make up a majority, the number of migrants coming from countries further abroad has been growing in recent years, straining a US immigration system that has not seen any significant reform in nearly four decades.
A $118 billion bi-partisan measure that would have diverted funding and resources to border security – along with aid to Israel and Ukraine – died Wednesday after Senate Republicans blocked a deal that they had worked to put together. That move came after former President Donald Trump attacked the bill and House Speaker Mike Johnson described it as “dead on arrival.”
Democrats are now seeking ways to salvage aid for Ukraine and Israel, leaving the long-awaited promise of border reform dangling in the political winds of a highly charged and divisive election year.
News of the surge in Chinese migrants, meanwhile, is prompting concern among those who say it will only fuel further hostility toward the Chinese and API community writ large amid ongoing tensions between Washington and Beijing.
“This clip will fuel the DC anti-China machine even more,” noted one commenter on Twitter, referring to the 60 Minutes report, “as if it needs more fuel in 2024.”
That same sentiment was captured after video emerged of Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas grilling the head of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew during a recent congressional hearing last month. The exchange drew widespread criticism from those who saw in it echoes of a McCarthy era with hunt.
In the video, Cotton is seen repeatedly asking Chew, who is from Singapore, if he is or has been a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
Victor Shi with the group Voters of Tomorrow called the grilling “blatantly racist” in a column for the Boston Globe. “This type of blatant anti-Asian rhetoric is becoming increasingly normalized by those in the Republican Party — and the further it goes on, the more it puts those in my community in danger,” notes Shi.
Back in New York, friends and relatives of Pan have organized a fundraiser to help his family pay down the 200,000 Yuan (or roughly $28,000) loan he took out for his journey to New York, reports the World Journal. Pan leaves behind a wife and 18-year-old daughter, both of whom remain in China.
The community in Sunset Park is petitioning the government to grant Pan’s family visas to enter the country to see their loved one for a final time.
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