A group of migrants is apprehended by Yuma Sector Border Patrol. (File photo by Jerry Glaser/Customs and Border Patrol)
WASHINGTON – Republicans have been warning that “military-aged” men have been crossing the Southwest border in threatening droves since President Joe Biden took office – especially from adversaries such as China and Russia.
“It’s like a military invasion,” former President Donald Trump said at a rally in Tucson last week. “We are being conquered and we are being occupied by a foreign element. And you know, if you think about it, China has a 5 million man army.”
Although migration from China has generally been rising, there is no evidence that Chinese and Russian citizens are crossing the border for military purposes, experts say.
China’s slow economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war with Ukraine propelled a 2023 spike in illegal immigration from those countries that has largely subsided, said David Bier, director of immigration at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank.
“It’s inflammatory rhetoric that has no basis in reality. There’s no military takeover of the United States,” he said. “They’re coming for freedom. They’re coming for opportunity.”
Nearly all migrants who cross the border illegally come from Latin America.
The number of Border Patrol encounters with people from outside the Americas hit nearly 200,000 last year in the four Southwest border states – more than triple the 2021 total. The tally for fiscal year 2024, which is almost over, stands at 137,340.
That’s still a small share of the total: 2.2 million encounters last year with migrants from this hemisphere, and 1.8 million this year. Illegal migration hit a record high in December.
“Attention has been disproportionately focused on nationalities of migrants that are coming from farther away – the Chinese, Indian, Ukrainians, Turkish – that are really a small number,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
But Republicans have clung to the narrative.
At the Republican National Convention, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro warned that “Chinese spies” are infiltrating the country via the border.
Shortly after becoming House speaker in January, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said that migrants are coming from “adversarial nations … to do only God knows what.”
Trump routinely warns that “military-age” men are pouring across the border.
“Large numbers of people are coming in from China,” he said at a New York City rally in May. “They are physically fit. They’re 19 to 25. Almost every one is a male and they look like fighting age. I think they’re building an army. There are 29,000 people over the last – I think they’re building – they want to get us from within.”
Single adults accounted for 87% of Chinese migrant encounters along the Southwest border this year. CBP data doesn’t indicate the sex of these migrants.
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It’s no surprise to migration experts that single men of working age would be well-represented at the Southwest border, because adults traveling on their own are better able to endure the trek through the Darien Gap, the roadless stretch of jungle that connects Colombia and Panama.
“There’s really no significant threat of single military-age men coming to the United States,” said Ruiz Soto. “More single adults come because the numbers overall have increased.”
Migrants from China often start the journey in Ecuador, which didn’t require a visa until recently. Unlike Chinese citizens, Russians don’t need a visa to visit Mexico, saving thousands of miles on the way to the U.S.
The number of single Chinese migrants encountered by the Border Patrol in the four Southwest border states has quadrupled since Biden took office, from 8,926 in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2021, to 38,226 in the current fiscal year. Most came through California.
In Arizona, border agents reported 39 such encounters in 2021, 4,155 last year and 428 so far this year.
Word of the Darien Gap route began to spread in China as COVID-19 lockdowns left many people out of work and looking for opportunity elsewhere.
“You had deteriorating conditions in China, increasing authoritarianism, persecution of political dissidence and worse economic conditions,” Bier said.
The push factors driving Russians to seek a new life in the United States have been somewhat different.
Many military age men fled after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Encounters with Russians skyrocketed, quadrupling to 28,000 in 2022 along the Southwest border and topping 50,000 in 2023, before dropping to 16,000 this year, according to CBP data.
Rachel Wilson, a Tucson immigration lawyer who works with Russian and Ukrainian migrants, called the rhetoric about military infiltration “completely absurd” given the strict screening process for asylum seekers.
“There are men who don’t want to serve, who don’t want to fight Ukraine, who are politically opposed to it, and also some people who just don’t want to get killed in a war, and their families,” she said.
The narrative about a military invasion also angers James Holeman, who leads the Arizona-based Battalion Search and Rescue – volunteers who search remote areas for migrants in distress or who died after crossing the border.
While they mostly find people from Latin America, he recalled a group of 200 asylum seekers from Africa and India badly in need of water miles from a port of entry.
“A majority of people are fleeing for their lives,” he said. “Migration is an act of desperation.”
