They come for different reasons. Some are seeking economic opportunity. Others are disillusioned with Xi Jinping’s rule. Many have seen videos online of other Chinese migrants trekking across the lawless strip of jungle between Colombia and Panama on their way to a better life. Tens of thousands of Chinese citizens have travelled to South America, the first step on a perilous journey to the United States. The route is so popular that it has earned a Chinese nickname: zouxian, or walking the line.

For the past two years Chinese migrants have been the fastest-growing group crossing the southern border of the United States. More than 37,000 of them were encountered by the US Border Patrol in 2023, up from 3,813 in 2022 and 689 in 2021. Another 21,000 came in the first eight months of this year. They remain a fraction of the 2m migrants who tried to cross the frontier in 2023. But because America and China are locked in economic, ideological and geostrategic competition, the Chinese migrants have become a political lightning rod.

To hear Donald Trump tell it, the newcomers from China are mostly men of military age. “Are they trying to build a little army in our country?” he has asked. Other Republican politicians have called Chinese migrants potential spies. Kamala Harris and the Democrats are less alarmist, but they worry about the border, too. Amid a presidential campaign where immigration is a top concern and China a convenient villain, there has been little effort to understand what is driving this movement of people and what it says about each country.

The Economist spent three months reporting in Colombia, Mexico and the United States. We interviewed dozens of migrants, as well as smugglers, border guards and experts. Several people allowed us to track their zouxian journeys. Some reached the United States after weeks of travelling by boat, bus, foot and plane. Others lost everything along the way. Most were drawn by the promise of a better future and followed a playbook that seeks to exploit America’s broken immigration system. But their journeys also shine a light on China, where the stifling rule of Mr Xi and worsening economic malaise are pushing people away.

For many Chinese migrants, the first stop in the Americas is Ecuador, which until recently offered them visa-free entry. But they quickly move to Colombia. That is where we met Ms Huang, a woman in her 40s who wore a bright pink dress. She had already defied the conservative norms of her birthplace, a poor village in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou. Most women from the village spend their lives farming and raising children. Ms Huang, though, had left for bigger towns, raised two children and divorced a husband who gambled too much.

She had come to Necoclí, a seaside town on the edge of the Caribbean, and was about to enter the treacherous jungles of the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama. Her younger sisters, both in their 20s, had come too. Neither of them had been outside China before. They knew little about the dangers ahead but dreamed of reaching America, said Ms Huang. Since the pandemic her employer, a grocery-delivery service, had cut her wages and increased her hours. She had seen the videos of other Chinese migrants successfully making the journey. “You only live once, right?...Either you’re brave enough to go and fight for it, or you just stick to your path, accept your status, and keep your head down,” she said.

Many of the migrants we met in Necoclí were motivated by economics. Back home they felt like the ladders to a better life were being lifted away. A years-long crisis in China’s property sector has left consumers depressed and threatened deflation. The government’s recent stimulus measures have led to a stockmarket rally, but pessimism over the economy lingers. Ordinary Chinese once felt that with enough hard work, they could get ahead. But according to new research, they now believe that being well-connected and growing up rich are the keys to success. “In China, for people in the lower-income class, for ordinary migrant workers like us, there’s just no way out,” said Ms Huang.

Amid this malaise Mr Xi and the Communist Party have tightened their control over society, ramping up censorship and cracking down on critics. Some of the migrants we talked to in Necoclí were desperate to escape this oppression. Ah Gan and Ah Zhen, a couple in their 40s from southern China, had brought their 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter to the town. They were sick of living in an “information cocoon” and wanted their children to have more freedom, said Ah Gan, who is partially blind.

Similar thoughts propel Sam Lu, a 36-year-old from Wuhan who said he had been threatened by the police in China after criticising the government’s handling of covid-19 in 2020. Mr Lu caught the virus early on, while the authorities were denying its severity, then infected his grandmother, who died. Standing at the ferry station in Necoclí, where migrants were wrapping their belongings in garbage bags before boarding boats for the Darién Gap, Mr Lu said he had sold his apartment to pay for the trip. China’s government was no longer allowing its citizens to speak—he would rather die on the road to America than continue living that way, he said.

Death is a real risk in the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous stretches of wilderness in the world. Migrants pay smugglers managed by the Gulf Clan, a drug-trafficking cartel, for passage through part of the jungle. They face steep, muddy mountains, roiling rivers and potential kidnapping, robbery and rape by armed bandits. More than 300 migrants have died or gone missing in the gap since 2022, according to the International Organisation for Migration, a UN body. Médecins Sans Frontières, a humanitarian group, treated nearly 700 victims of sexual violence there, many of them children, in 2023.

Despite the dangers, more than half a million migrants crossed the Darién Gap in 2023, double the number in 2022, according to the authorities in Panama. Another 238,185 have crossed so far this year. Chinese migrants are the fourth-largest group making the trek (behind those from Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador). Their numbers jumped from only 2,000 in 2022 to more than 25,000 in 2023.

Chinese migrants have an easier time than others because they can afford “VIP packages” that shorten their time in the jungle. In Necoclí migrants and smugglers described three options: a $300 package that is all on foot and takes at least a week; one for $700 that is two days on foot and two days by boat; and a $1,500 trip by horse that is meant to take just a day. Smugglers take photos of the migrants at various stations and post them on WeChat to prove that they are delivered safely. Most of the Chinese migrants we spoke to chose the $700 package. After exiting the jungle, they took buses through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, all the way to Mexico.

The dangers of the Darién Gap notwithstanding, many Chinese migrants said the hardest part of their journey was in Mexico. Under pressure from the United States to reduce migrant numbers at their border, Mexico has implemented a policy that seems intended to exhaust migrants. They are rounded up by the Mexican authorities and dumped in the cities of Tapachula and Villahermosa in southern Mexico, thousands of miles away from the United States. Some migrants have been picked up and moved several times. That strategy, along with tough new restrictions in the United States, led to a 77% decline in the US Border Patrol’s encounters with migrants trying to cross into the United States from Mexico in August compared with December, when they peaked.

The migrants stranded in Mexico have become targets for smugglers and organised crime. That was clear just outside Tapachula, where we saw hundreds of migrants hoping to board commercial buses that would take them northwards. Some from Venezuela and Afghanistan described how the Mexican government’s policies had driven up the prices charged by smugglers. One woman said she was paying 300 pesos for every 15 minutes in a smuggler’s car—the equivalent of $1 per minute. Walking north was too dangerous: her partner had been kidnapped by armed men on motorcycles who demanded a $75 ransom for his release.

Chinese migrants, in particular, are preyed on because they tend to have more money. While trying to cross Mexico, Ah Gan and Ah Zhen were abandoned by a group of other Chinese migrants, then forced by a smuggler to pay the group’s debts of several thousand dollars. Later they were locked in a motel room and swindled out of more money by smugglers who claimed it would pay for bribes at checkpoints. The couple escaped by telling their captors that they needed to go to a nearby town to buy new shoes for their children, whose old shoes had been ruined in the jungle. After making the purchase, they ran away to Mexico City. (Ah Gan can be heard in the audio clip above.)

The Chinese government has said that it is working with other countries to crack down on human smuggling. But potential migrants seem more interested in other policy changes along the zouxian route. On July 1st, for example, Ecuador suspended visa-free entry for Chinese citizens. As a result, the number of Chinese crossing the Darién Gap dropped from more than 1,000 in June to 53 in August. In online discussion groups in China, those thinking about making the journey have begun looking for other entryways, such as Bolivia (where Chinese passport holders can get a visa on arrival) or Suriname (where they don’t need a visa).

In Tapachula a Chinese migrant with the surname Chen was getting anxious about the path ahead. In June the administration of Joe Biden made it much more difficult for those who enter the United States without permission to seek asylum and remain in the country, a common approach. In July, two months after the United States and China agreed to resume co-operation on migration issues, America sent 116 Chinese citizens home on the first large deportation flight since 2018. “The policies are all changing,” said Ms Chen. “All I care about is hurrying up, moving forward, going faster.”

Chinese migrants who make it to Mexico’s northern frontier must navigate America’s border wall. Here they have options, too. Some climb over with the help of smugglers’ ladders. Others find areas where the wall turns into a fence and simply cut a hole in it. In more rugged areas, the wall becomes nothing more than a wire which can be walked under or around with a bit of athleticism. This is usually done at night. As the sun comes up, successful migrants walk through the sand in the direction of Jacumba Hot Springs, a town with fewer than 1,000 residents in southern California. When we visited in July, dozens of Chinese migrants were passing through each day.

Once in the United States, migrants look for the Border Patrol in order to turn themselves in and apply for asylum. They are then taken for processing at a detention centre. America’s asylum law allows anyone who is physically present in the country to apply for protection if they are at risk of persecution. The first step is often a “credible-fear” screening that is meant to assess whether they are afraid of returning to their home countries. Migrants who fail are put on a deportation list and detained for up to six months. But many are then released until the government can convince China to take them back, something it has been reluctant to do until recently.

Those who pass the initial screening are given a date for a hearing and released. Chinese applicants were granted asylum 55% of the time in the 12 months to October 2023, according to the Justice Department. But the department is thought to have a backlog of more than a million cases, including more 32,000 involving Chinese migrants. On average, asylum seekers wait more than three-and-a-half years for their hearings. In the meantime, they can stay in the United States. After six months, they can obtain a work permit.

Many residents of Jacumba Hot Springs are not happy about the situation. Kali Kai Braun, the caretaker of a shooting club near the border, said he had seen smugglers’ trucks drop off migrants almost every day since mid-2023. (He can be heard below.) The Economist witnessed dozens of them running across the club’s grounds. Mr Braun is convinced that many of the Chinese migrants are not legitimate asylum seekers. He had painted “Fuck you, Chinese Communist Party” in Mandarin on a small stone lion. It was a message, he said, to Chinese soldiers or spies.

There is no evidence that China is sending an army to America, as Mr Trump claims. A more valid complaint is that many Chinese asylum seekers are actually economic migrants. But some have genuine worries about persecution. Wang Jun, a 34-year-old dissident, had been imprisoned for more than three years in China for “subverting state power” after joining a pro-democracy group. He was released in 2020 but remained under surveillance. In 2023 he heard about the Darién Gap and decided to attempt the journey. After being blocked at several airports in China, he escaped through a land border in the south. In northern Mexico he was extorted by smugglers, officials and even fellow migrants. He was overjoyed to have reached the United States.

Mr Wang, though, failed his credible-fear interview. He says the asylum officer did not want to see the documents which proved he had spent time in prison for his political views. He was detained for months, but was able to appeal his deportation with the help of activists and NGOs. Mei Zhou, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles, says she has met many Chinese migrants who fabricate stories of persecution. That hurts genuine asylum seekers. Immigration judges who encounter too many “fake storytellers” become more cynical and reject those who really do need protection, she says.

Mr Wang (heard below) eventually settled in an area near Monterey Park, a suburb of Los Angeles that has become popular with Chinese migrants. Its Fatty Ding Plaza is famous on social media as a one-stop-shop for all of a new arrival’s needs. The run-down strip mall has restaurants, places to buy SIM cards and hotels offering rooms for as little as $15 a night. Most importantly, it has job agencies offering work in warehouses and on construction crews. There is no need for a work permit. But migrants can expect to earn below the minimum wage.

One calling himself Tom (after his favourite actor, Tom Cruise) tells The Economist that he has tried three jobs in the 40 days since he arrived in the United States. His latest gig, as an assistant mechanic, pays $100 a day for twelve hours of labour with no breaks. Still, Tom does not regret coming to America. “As long as you work hard, you will have opportunities,” he says. “In China, you won’t have opportunities even if you work hard.” He hopes to get a work permit after six months and to eventually bring his wife and child to America.

Ah Gan and Ah Zhen feel similarly. They made it from Mexico City to Tijuana, where they hired a smuggler to get them and their two children across the border. In August they arrived in California, exactly three months after they had left China—and much poorer than when they began. When we met them in September they were renting a small home in San Jose. As they waited for their asylum hearing, Ah Zhen delivered parcels, an informal job she found through a Chinese app. Ah Gan was seeking a doctor to check his eyes. And they were trying to place their children in a local school. Nothing was easy and it was not clear how long this new life in America would last. But all four said the trip was “worth it”.

Of all the migrants The Economist met on the road, only a handful made it to the United States. The three Huang sisters stayed in touch from June until mid-July, when they said they were heading to Tijuana. Then they stopped responding. Mr Lu, the young man from Wuhan, crossed the US-Mexico border, according to a friend who said they were detained together on the American side. But Mr Lu has yet to be released. Mr Wang is now living in a house with five other dissidents, all of whom crossed the Darién Gap last year and have asylum hearings scheduled for 2025 or 2026.

In some ways what is happening resembles the situation a little over a century ago, when the forerunner of America’s border patrol was founded. Early on, its inspectors mainly pursued migrants from China who were seeking to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. Back then, too, the journey from China to America was dangerous and expensive. But the migrants believed they would find a better life in California and elsewhere.

The big difference is that China is no longer a poor, unstable country, as it was back then. Today it boasts cutting-edge research labs, powerful armed forces and the second largest economy in the world. China’s spectacular rise to superpower status has filled its leaders with a sense of confidence. For years Mr Xi has declared that the East is rising and the West is declining. He claims that China’s economic and political systems are superior to those of America and its allies.

What, then, to make of the thousands of Chinese leaving the country for America? Their decisions reflect a calculation about the zouxian route: that, while dangerous, it is manageable owing to the accumulated knowledge of previous migrants, the industry that has sprung up around it and the porousness of America’s southern border. But in plenty of cases their choice to leave is also an indictment of Mr Xi’s rule. Along the path to America, many Chinese migrants spoke of unfulfilled ambition. They had given up on the Chinese dream. Now they wanted to see what America had to offer. ■

Listen to the first in a four-part podcast series on the Chinese migrants crossing dangerous jungle to reach America.