MEXICO CITY —
The government of Ecuador on Tuesday suspended a policy allowing visa-free entry of Chinese citizens in an apparent move to crack down on asylum seekers who fly into the South American nation en route to the United States.
In the last year, Ecuador has become a key transit point for tens of thousands of Chinese nationals intending to travel onward to the U.S.-Mexico border. Many eventually cross into California.
From Ecuador, many Chinese migrants make their way to Tijuana and other points in Baja California — an overland trek of more than 3,000 miles, through jungles, deserts and cities — and enter neighboring San Diego County. Most give themselves up to the U.S. Border Patrol, requesting asylum.
Migrants are given food from local volunteers at a makeshift camp near the border wall at Jacumba Hot Springs, Calif.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a post on X cited a “worrying increase in migratory flows from China.” Chinese citizens were “using Ecuador as a point of departure to arrive at other destinations in the hemisphere,” it said.
The Biden administration, seeking to counter Republican assertions that the border is out of control, has been pressuring Mexico and other transit nations to crack down on asylum seekers from across the world who have been traveling through South and Central America and Mexico en route to the U.S. border.
The numbers of undocumented Chinese migrants entering into San Diego County illegally from Mexico has grown dramatically in recent years, with the area now the main crossing point for nearly all Chinese national asylum seekers, according to U.S. government statistics.
Chinese national Zhang Hao uses his phone to book a taxi at the Iris Avenue bus station parking lot in San Diego, where he and dozens of other asylum seekers were dropped off by the U.S. Border Patrol.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
In the current fiscal year, from Oct. 1, 2023, through April 2024, the U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego recorded 27,135 apprehensions of Chinese nationals. That is more than double the 10,520 detentions of Chinese nationals in all of the previous fiscal year — and almost 30 times the 947 apprehensions of Chinese migrants detained in all of fiscal 2022.
Most Chinese asylum seekers detained at the southwest border are released pending future court dates in U.S. immigration courts, officials say.
The Ecuadorian government statement called the suspension of visa waivers for Chinese nationals “temporary,” but did not give a date for reinstating the policy.