Biden’s Border Crisis Promotes Foreign Espionage in Plain Sight; Security Risk: The Unprecedented Surge in Chinese Illegal Immigration

In March, a Chinese man wandered onto a Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms, California. He was believed to have crossed illegally into the U.S. and was released by DHS pending a decision in his asylum application. He claimed to have been lost.

But it isn’t that easy to stumble onto what the Marine Times called their “vast combat training installation located in the remote California desert.” Though he was apprehended, he scoped out the security at our biggest Marine base. According to the Wall Street Journal, there have been around 100 such “innocent” incidents in recent years.

These are likely amateurs carrying out one-off espionage gigs for China. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law demands that, “all organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.”

Earlier this year, The Heritage Foundation Oversight Project filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Defense Department to see how many bases had been targets of such surveillance. To date, they have only received information from Pearl Harbor, but responses from that base alone showed multiple intrusions by Chinese nationals in the past few years.

China has many potential amateur spies to choose from. Their Belt and Road initiative construction projects in Africa and Asia are notorious for bringing in workers from China rather than hiring locals. Chinese investment in the U.S. Northern Marianas Islands brought problems from “human trafficking to birth tourism, labor abuse, money laundering, and public corruption,” according to the commonwealth’s governor.

Soon, these same ills may be coming to the mainland United States. Hiring thousands of Chinese nationals to work in sensitive U.S. industries or locations invites a problem that political analyst John Hulsman calls espionage “hiding in plain sight.”

This year so far, 27,000 Chinese nationals have been apprehended at the southern border, and most of them will be released after they state a “credible fear” of persecution. If they apply, for asylum, they can get authorization to work within six months, after which Chinese-owned businesses can legally hire them.

You couldn’t invent a cheaper, faster, less scrutinized foreign work-visa program if you tried. —>READ MORE HERE

Security Risk: The Unprecedented Surge in Chinese Illegal Immigration:

House Homeland Security Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Accountability

Before President Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, illicit travel from China usually amounted to single digits per month, in 2019 and 2020, by five, seven or a couple of dozen apprehended in any given month. About 991 were encountered in 2018, 2,060 in 2019 before Covid, and 323 for all of 2020.

But in the three years since the president’s inauguration ending in March 2024, DHS’s alluring quick-release policies resulted in more than 50,000 Border Patrol encounters with Chinese nationals, at escalating monthly rates surpassing 4,500 and reaching nearly 6,000 during calendar year 2024. More Chinese nationals are now crossing the Southwest border near San Diego than Mexican nationals.

—>READ MORE HERE

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