Date: May 6th, 2024 2:46 AM
Author: Umber underhanded stag film philosopher-king
Just lol these dumb furks don't even fathom that by moving to US he's assured his son will have a sexless life of lonely NOWAG whereas in gorgeous China he cld easily get a thin girl
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IMMIGRATION
‘The world has changed’: WeChat, snakeheads and the new era of global migration
“This is not a U.S.-Mexico border problem. This is now a worldwide issue,” a former Homeland Security official said.
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May 4, 2024, 3:00 PM GMT+5
By David Noriega, Aarne Heikkila and Adiel Kaplan
JACUMBA HOT SPRINGS, Calif. — Shortly after dawn, in the desert east of San Diego, a group of migrants huddled around a campfire. They had come together on this desolate stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border from four different continents: Young men from India shared snacks with women from Nicaragua, while a man from Georgia stood next to a family from Brazil.
A volunteer with a local humanitarian group hauled over a beverage cooler filled with papers: legal information printed in 22 different languages. As he handed them out — in Gujarati, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian — he said, “Welcome to the United States.”
This is the new normal of migration to the southern border: What was once mostly a regional phenomenon has become truly global, with the share of migrants coming from the four closest countries dropping and the number from elsewhere around the world increasing.
An NBC News analysis of newly released data from the Department of Homeland Security shows a fundamental shift. Before the pandemic, roughly 9 in 10 migrants crossing the border illegally (that is, between ports of entry) came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the four countries closest to the border. Those countries no longer hold the majority: As of 2023, for the first time since the U.S. has collected such data, half of all migrants who cross the border now come from elsewhere globally.
The greatest numbers have come from countries farther away in the Americas that have never before sent migrants to the border at this scale. In the 2019 fiscal year, for example, the number of Colombians apprehended illegally crossing the border was 400. In fiscal 2023, it exploded to 154,080 — a nearly four-hundred-fold increase.
But they come, too, from countries in Africa, Eastern Europe and every region in Asia. There have been dramatic increases in the number of migrants from the world’s most populous countries: Between fiscal 2019 and 2023, the number of migrants from China and India grew more than elevenfold and fivefold, respectively. And some countries that previously sent negligible numbers of migrants to the U.S. border have seen staggering increases. In fiscal 2019, the total number of people from the northwest African nation of Mauritania apprehended at the border was 20. Four years later, that number was 15,260. For migrants from Turkey, the number went from 60 to 15,430. The list goes on: More than 50 nationalities saw apprehensions multiplied by a hundred or more.
Experts and U.S. government officials attribute this explosive growth in large part to the pandemic, which provoked mass migration around the world, adding serious challenges to an immigration system already beleaguered by a decade of severe backlogs. Another major factor is the massive expansion of transcontinental smuggling networks, itself fueled by widespread digital technology.
These shifting migration flows account for a significant portion of the record-breaking numbers at the border that have dominated this year’s election cycle. They amount to a major reorganization of global migration patterns — and a paradigm shift for U.S. immigration policy and international relations.
“Fundamentally, our system is not equipped to deal with migration as it exists now, not just this year and last year and the year before, but for years preceding us,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview with NBC News. “We have a system that was last modified in 1996. We’re in 2024 now. The world has changed.”
A sophisticated Chinese snakehead network illustrates a new era in migration
The landscape around Jacumba Hot Springs, a town of fewer than 600 people near the eastern edge of San Diego County, is rocky and mountainous. The steel border fence stops at several points where the ground rises into sharp, ragged inclines dotted with boulders, leaving spaces easy for migrants to squeeze through. Border authorities routinely block these gaps with razor wire only for smugglers to snip them open again.
surge of chinese migrants NN video
An aerial view of the southern border, in Jacumba, Calif.NBC News
One afternoon in March, a group of about 30 migrants from China clambered through one such gap and into the United States. Among them was Wei Bin, a middle-aged man from the port city of Tianjin who traveled with his 14-year-old son. Wei said the economic damage wrought by the pandemic, coupled with China’s repressive zero-Covid policies, had led him to the conclusion that his home country offered no viable future for his son.
So they took off for the United States. In an interview with NBC News, Wei described their 45-day journey: They flew first to Ecuador, one of the few countries in the Americas that accept visa-free travel from China, and from there they moved painstakingly north.
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The trip was arranged by Chinese smugglers known as snakeheads. Wei never saw his snakeheads, and he knew nothing about them — he communicated with them exclusively via WeChat and paid for everything online. The smugglers’ services cost him around $10,000 per person, and in return, he received precise instructions on where and how to meet with an interlocking series of local contacts, often members of pre-existing criminal smuggling networks based in each of the countries he traveled through. It was these smugglers — Ecuadorians, Colombians, Mexicans — who did the actual work of moving Wei and his son from one place to another.
The journey was not easy. Somewhere in Colombia, the first snakehead stopped responding to Wei’s messages, scamming him out of thousands of dollars and leaving him stranded until he got the contact for a new snakehead from another Chinese migrant on the trail. And while Wei and his son were in a small boat circumventing a portion of the infamous Darien Gap — a dense stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama — they watched another boat full of migrants capsize.
“I would not recommend anyone undertake the route that we just took,” Wei said. “It’s too perilous.”
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5525601&forum_id=2#47638999)