By the end of the Trump Administration, fewer than 1,000 illegal Chinese immigrants had entered the United States. Three years later, 52,700 Chinese illegals had entered. Now, in the first seven months of the last federal fiscal year of the Biden Administration, the Department of Homeland Security has tallied 48,500 Chinese illegals.
These numbers probably show “processed” border crossers. The number that escaped “processing”—i.e., being interviewed and released into the general population—is unknown, but these would make for an even larger total.
At some point, the DHS chief, Mr. Mayorkas, felt that the “processing” of Chinese crossing the border was too time-consuming and onerous for his staff and saw fit to “drastically reduce” the number of mandatory interview questions.
Do pass go
Welcome to America: a few questions, then freedom. Don’t worry, there are (probably) no wrong answers.
How many illegals would refuse to enter and would reverse course if one of the questions was “Denounce the communist Chinese government and everything it stands for in writing and then sign your statement—and we’ll notarize it—okay?”? That might provide DHS with the biggest time-saver of all.
Some of these illegals have taken up tourism in and about military installations.
In March 2024, a Chinese illegal immigrant got himself arrested in California “after entering a Marine Corps base without authorization and ignoring orders to leave.” One presumes that this conscientious illegal didn’t want to leave until he had accomplished his mission. This was the remote Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms. No other tourist attractions are nearby.
Chinese tourists can’t get enough of U.S. military installations, even in remote Alaska, where “suspected spies for the Communist Chinese Party have reportedly entered U.S. military bases…multiple times, pretending to be lost tourists.” Visit Alaska for the scenery but stay for our secrets.
In September 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Chinese nationals, sometimes posing as tourists, have accessed military bases and sensitive sites in the U.S. as many as 100 times in recent years….” The gatecrashers “range from Chinese nationals found crossing into a U.S. missile range in New Mexico to scuba divers swimming in murky waters near a U.S. government rocket launch site in Florida.”
Must report
The most interesting part is that Chinese nationals “were pressed into service and required to report back to the Chinese government.” Our friend on the California Marine base probably owed somebody a report and was afraid to leave without being able to make one.
The illegals may be swimming in a larger sea of tourists…but are the tourists real? According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of Chinese nationals in the U.S. is 5.4 million. Does this number include the illegals? Does it include a pool of phony tourists owing somebody a report?
Your author was discussing this matter with a colleague this week, and said colleague had his own story. His firm, a major defense contractor, was in a certain place operating a facility to fulfill certain government orders. One day, a Chinese travel and tourism office opened across the street. Soon busloads of Chinese “tourists” were arriving every day and swarming the area. The contractor moved out of that location on the q.t.
In 2023, two House committee chairmen, James Comer and Glenn Grothman, began investigating “recent reports of Chinese foreign nationals breaching and accessing secure U.S. military bases and facilities.”
The House Committee on Homeland Security has also been getting into the act, and in April 2024 it released its “Startling Stats” factsheet.
In May, Republican Representative Pat Fallon, who serves on the National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs subcommittee, held a classified hearing entitled “Intruder Alert: Assessing the CCP’s Ongoing Infiltration of U.S. Military Installations.” Congressman Fallon noted that according to Navy Admiral Daryl Caudle, “incidents of foreign nationals from China and Russia trying to breach Navy bases occur ‘two or three times a week.’ ”
Two persons familiar with this matter told me to “multiply that by ten.”
Known and unknown
Another congressman sounded the alarm this month, pointing to a broader danger: “Mark Green, a former U.S. Army serviceman and representative for Tennessee, claimed many of the Chinese nationals entering America were ‘military-age men,’ many of them having ‘known ties’ to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA).”
But how do we know about these known ties? Perhaps Green is recalling some classified briefing.
And in this area of national security, says Rebecca Grant, a national security analyst at IRIS Independent Research, the intelligence agencies are “never going to give us public information.”
In which case, will the problem ever get fixed? □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
