The Federation for American Immigration Reform's (FAIR) in-depth review of the migration trends from 2021 to 2024 reveals an unprecedented surge in illegal immigration from mainland China during Biden's presidency.
According to the data, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered 3,871 Chinese nationals in 2020. In 2021, that grew to 23,471 encounters and continued to escalate. 78,701 encounters were recorded in 2024.
In total, during the Biden administration, over 200,000 Chinese nationals were encountered by CBP.
Ira Mehlman, media director for FAIR, says the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) certainly recognized the vulnerability that America's open borders presented.
"They took full advantage," he asserts. "A huge spike in illegal immigration from China asking for asylum, regardless of whether it had any merit, was basically a ticket into the country. And because China, in most cases, refuses to accept people who are deported, they would likely end up remaining here."
Mehlman says many are being used by the CCP as operatives in the United States.
"They have family back home in China who're living in a totalitarian country there," he points out. "They can be pressed into service just because of the leverage that the CCP has over their relatives back home."
Meanwhile, the U.S. is still admitting large numbers of Chinese students to elite universities.
"They have access to some of the most vitally economic and strategic information that's out there," the FAIR spokesman explains. "This is a vulnerability that needs to be addressed."
U.S. government agencies and media outlets have also highlighted several recent cases in which illegal immigrants have killed U.S. citizens.
According to the Cato Institute, legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, and native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are in the middle.
An analysis Cato conducted this year notes that recent peer-reviewed empirical studies have found no link between violent crime and illegal immigration, a negative relationship between the number of illegal immigrants and most types of nonviolent crime, and lower illegal immigrant criminal conviction and arrest rates in Texas, compared to other subpopulations in Texas.
But illegal immigration and the crimes illegal immigrants commit are "notoriously difficult to measure," as researchers must rely on methodologies to estimate crime rates, such as analyzing correctional inmate data from the U.S. Census Bureau or using more comprehensive state-level data from places like Texas.
