Reuters World News - Why Chinese migrants are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

This special weekend episode is all about China. Meet the new migrants making the arduous trek over the Mexico-U.S. border. We talk with those who have left China and find out how they arrived on the Darien Gap. Plus a hot new trend seizes the young and unemployed – Buddhist devotion. But is it religious resurgence, or a novel way to find a job? Plus we find out how Beijing is responding to a declining birth rate by easing restrictions on single women. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt-out of targeted advertising Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today. Along the US-Mexico border, a new type of asylum seeker is springing up. Chinese migrants. What's behind this search? And for those who stayed put in China but can't find a job, religious salvation awaits. We head to a Buddhist temple where the young and unemployed are praying for work. Plus, a possible solution to China's falling birth rates, single ladies, using IVF. It's Saturday, April 29th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. I'm Kim Vinal in London. We start at the US-Mexico border in Fronton, Texas. Over the last few years, immigration officials have been struggling to handle throngs of migrants seeking asylum in the United States. Chinese nationals are increasingly among

them, spurred on by the economic aftershocks of China's COVID lockdowns and difficulty in obtaining US visas. Our reporters Echo Wang and Micah Rosenberg met some of them just after they crossed the Rio Grande into Texas, where they were met by US Customs and Border Patrol. Echo begins by describing her meeting with a Chinese mother and her five-year-old daughter. They flew from China to the Netherlands before heading to Ecuador. One ID for you, one ID for him. I met Li Hua Wu by the border and she had spent by the time I met her over a month on the road with her five-year daughter, taking buses, ferry boats, rickshaw and all kinds of transportation. You could imagine.

She said she had already thought about moving to other countries. Because being a single mom, she said she had experienced discrimination in China. And she also wanted a better environment for her daughter to grow up. But what made her pull the trigger was last winter in November, December. When the city she was living in went through a very serious COVID lockdown. We have baby formula. We don't need anything for the baby. We have stuff for the baby.

These migrants often have lived. learned about the route on social media. So they can oftentimes come prepared knowing what to expect, sometimes even bringing sort of the correct gear that you might need for a jungle trek, and even getting the numbers of particular local guides who they can pay to help take them along the route. What we found is that many of them were starting in Ecuador, where they could fly in without a visa. And then from there, they learned of the route

for other migrants who had taken it previously to go all the way up through South America to the U.S. border, and then turn themselves in to border agents. Can you speak to Andrew? No, I know. Even though they're increasing at a much higher rate than other nationalities in recent months,

there's still a tiny sliver of the overall hundreds of thousands of migrants that are arriving at the border, but they really create a unique challenge for the Border Patrol agents who are most commonly used to dealing with Chinese-speaking migrants from this hemisphere. Customs and Border Patrol didn't respond to a request for comment

about the influx of Chinese migrants. In a March tweet, CBP chief border patrol agent, Gloria Chavez, said the increase was putting the workforce underst because of the language barrier and the longer processing time. West Li Hua Wu got released from the processing center in Texas. She flew to New York because she said that some of the other people in her group were planning to go. She settled in Chinatown outside of flushing because she said that's where you get better public schools. And now she is very worried about her economic situation because she realized

how expensive life is. She doesn't speak of language and she doesn't have a job. So she said life is quite different from what she expected. For Reuters, I'm Echlein. And I'm Michael Rosenberg in New York. To Beijing now,

where young people are trying this hot new trend of visiting temples. Is it a religious resurgence? Or are they hoping for an elusive job offer in exchange for their newfound devotion? Our reporter Laurie Chen on the highly educated youth praying for paychecks. I'm at Beijing's Lama Temple, a huge 600-year-old Buddhist temple complex in the historic heart of the city. What's striking is that there are a lot of young people around.

I'm here to investigate why temples have become a trending destination for young people in China, and they've been appearing all over Chinese social media. So some people around me, they seem to be praying very intently, holding sticks of insects, and bowing in front of lit cauldrons. Clouds of smoke are billowing everywhere, and the air smells strongly as sweet incense. While other people are taking selfies or standing in very long queues to buy Buddhist paraphernalia, China is an officially atheist country, and many of the young people I spoke to today don't describe themselves as religious.

However, they said that they are coming here to pray for career and academic success. So this apparent social media fad points to an underlying anxiety about prolonged high youth employment rates and an intensely competitive job market due to record high numbers of university graduates entering the market this year and China's slow economic recovery after three years of restrictive COVID curves. So we're about to interview two undergraduate students, surnamed Chen and Kong, who are both 19 years old. They say that they're here today to pray for their health, for their siblings to get good grades, and for emotional comfort. They mentioned that there is enormous pressure on young people today just because there are too many university

graduates and the threshold for finding employment keeps on getting higher with more and more young people choosing to study for a postgraduate degrees to increase their chances of getting a job. We're about to interview a young man surname Yu, who is a postgraduate student in Beijing. He says that he's come here to pray for a good job with a good salary. He describes himself as non-religious, but he came here previously to pray for luck in his postgraduate entrance exam, and he got good results, so he decided to come again today. I'm Laurie Chen with Reuters. Decades after implementing a one-child policy, China now confronts a very different problem, plunging birth rates. And single women like Chen Luodjin could be part of the solution.

Until recently, an unmarried woman like Chen wasn't allowed to register a child where she lives, but her province, Sichuan, just eased restrictions. It's a shift China is considering nationwide to address record low birth rates. Farah Master has been covering this and joins us now from Hong Kong. So Farah, tell us about Chen. Chen lives in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan province. And she had divorced last year and she opted to do IVF and now she is 10 weeks pregnant. She told us, you know, that being a single parent, it's not for everybody, but she's really happy with her decision and she really still wants to have a child, which is quite. why she opted for IVF.

So what might these policy changes mean for women like her? So for women like Chen, this basically means that if you're unmarried, you can still access the benefits that was only previously allowed to married women. So you can get maternity leave, you can get subsidies, which is a very big deal. And this is obviously really helpful for a lot of single women who would not have ordinarily been able to have children. Part of this also means that now private clinics are increasingly willing to offer IVF services to single ladies. And this is not something that's being replicated across the rest of the country at the moment.

Sichuan is relatively liberal in this. And it seems that a lot of women that we spoke with are opting for these kind of services there. What is driving the decline in birth rates in China? I think one of the biggest factors is young women, they just don't want to have children at the moment and they cite issues like the high cost of child care. A lot of them are, you know, growing in their careers. It's very difficult to have the support to continue a career and take care of children. That support net is not quite there in China. And there's a lot of gender discrimination. And I think this is one of the biggest issues, you know, within companies, it's perceived that

if you're having a baby, you can't progress. And it's especially pronounced in China more so than in the rest of the world. And so is there a sense that, you know, the government is really taking this seriously enough to enact policies to support women? So the government is very, very worried about the situation and they are rolling out different policies to try and support fertility rates in China and, you know, the increasing subsidies and all of this. But IVF has been a gray area just because the government wants to preach happy families and it's difficult then for them to also advocate to have a single mom raising the kids. So this is something that is a bit tricky, I think, for them to navigate.

And that's why it also takes time for it to unravel in China. But I think it's just a matter of time before we see more policies that address the declining birth rate. Farah, thank you. And that's it for today's edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back on Monday. Before you go, we'd love for you to tell us what you think about the show. There's a survey in the pod's description on the Reuters website or your preferred podcast platform.