The number of migrants coming across the U.S. southern border has increased in recent years. However, it’s not only migrants from Mexico and Latin America. The number of people coming from China has also spiked.
In 2023, around 37,000 Chinese citizens were apprehended at the border. That is 50 times more than in 2021.
These Chinese citizens are using Ecuador as their corridor into the United States. Ecuador did not require people from China to have a visa in order to fly there, however, that changed on June 18.
Ecuador’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility suspended its “visa waiver” into the country for Chinese nationals. It attributed the policy change to a “worrying increase” in numbers of people coming from China and not leaving.
“Approximately 50% of these entries have not left through regular routes and within the time established by law,” the ministry said in a statement. “For this reason, they would be in the country in an irregular migration situation or would have left through irregular routes to other destinations in the Hemisphere.”
One of the “other destinations” referred to in the statement is the U.S.
Newly discovered materials on a social network revealed a Chinese government agency helping Chinese nationals map their way to “Destination USA.”
The Daily Caller was first to report on the “American Self-Guided Tour Channel,” a Chinese-language group on the messaging platform Telegram. The platform provided a complete list of documents detailing routes from China to the U.S., largely with the first step being a flight to Ecuador and ending in California.
The Daily Caller said it discovered the social network group when it found an immigrant’s abandoned cellphone at the California-Mexico border earlier in 2024.
The network’s channel provided various resources, including what migrants should carry and Google Map screenshots of the journey. It showed locations of border wall gaps, including 12 in California as well as crossing points in Arizona and New Mexico.
It also provided a guide on how to respond to questions from Border Patrol agents and scripts on what to say for requesting asylum.
“When I’ve been out at the border, most of my interactions have been with Chinese people,” the mayor of El Cajon, California, told The Daily Caller. “I’ve come across migrant encampments, where there’s 100 or so Chinese people waiting to move on to the next stage. You would think that something of such major importance to not only the nation, but to municipalities, you would have somebody from the government calling you and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we know. This is what’s going on.’ We have no idea.”
