Chinese migration to the US is soaring. Here’s what happens next.
On any given morning, small groups of men dressed in jeans and hoodies hang around the Fatty Ding’s shopping plaza in Monterey Park, California, waiting for day-labor jobs or just passing time. This modest square has ricocheted around social media as a recommended destination for Chinese migrants, who are crossing illegally over the southern border into the United States in record numbers.
Monterey Park, just east of Los Angeles on Interstate 10, has been a migrant magnet for decades and is known as America’s first suburban Chinatown. It sits in the sunbaked San Gabriel Valley, where the network of Chinese churches and temples, businesses, service agencies, and cheap rooms for rent makes this – and surrounding cities – an immigrant gateway.
“The San Gabriel Valley is really ground zero for Chinese migrants and asylum-seekers overall,” says Kim Luu-Ng, an immigrant attorney in the Los Angeles area.
The local influx is part of record unauthorized immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Border Patrol encountered more than 24,000 Chinese between ports of entry in fiscal year 2023, compared with just 330 in 2020. This spike is a tiny amount as a share of last year’s 2.5 million encounters at the border, but it reflects a growing trend in the diversification of nationalities entering illegally from the south. Experts say the three years of strict pandemic lockdowns at the end of 2022.
