Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino recently shared a substantial uptick in illegal migration through his country — especially concerning travelers of Chinese origin headed for the United States — even compared to the uptick throughout the last several years.
Panama is home of the Darién Gap — the tumultuous and dangerous 30-mile-wide, 100-mile-long patch of land connecting South America and Central America shared with Colombia.
While a great deal of the uptick can be attributed to Venezuelans fleeing the communist regime as conditions worsen, authorities have taken note of a sharp and unprecedented surge of American bound Chinese migration.
Breitbart News reports:
While Venezuelans fleeing the socialist regime in their country amply lead the statistics, Panama's migration authority documented a notable surge in the number of U.S.-bound Chinese nationals passing through the jungle trail in recent years, going from a total of 296in the entirety of 2010-2019 to 12,070 during the first eight months of 2024. China is now the fourth-largest group by nationality on the list.
Mulino, who took office on July 1, vowed to curb illegal immigration through the Darién Gap throughout his presidential campaign. Shortly after taking office, the new Panamanian government began installing barbed wire fences across some of the jungle trail's routes and signed an agreement with the United States to establish U.S.-funded deportation flights that reportedly started in August. In that same month, the Panamanian government announced that it would launch deportation flight programs to China, India, Ecuador, and Colombia.
In addition to Panama, Ecuador began cracking down on illegal Chinese migrants passing through its territory by reinstating entry visa requirements for Chinese nationals in July, suspending a visa waiver agreement signed in January 2015 during the pro-China administration of socialist former President Rafael Correa.
While Panama vowed to curb the migrant flow passing through the Darién Gap, migrants can avoid the dangerous jungle trail altogether by flying to Nicaragua, where communist dictator Daniel Ortega maintains a policy of “weaponization” of migrants against the United States, granting U.S.-bound migrants safe passage through Nicaraguan territory in exchange for several fees and “fines” that have resulted in record-breaking profits for the communist regime.
A communist country's assistance in the flow of illegal migration also raises questions about the causes and motivations for this escalation.
Between October 1st, 2023 (when the fiscal year began) and January of this year, Border Patrol apprehended almost 16,000 Chinese migrants. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Chinese have become the fastest growing demographic of illegal immigrants. National security experts have expressed concern that this influx has been driven intentionally by the Chinese Communist Party and will increase the United States' vulnerability to espionage from a hostile superpower.
The vast majority of these migrants are single military aged males paying up to $55,000 to be smuggled, with many of them reciting responses that seemed to be canned and practiced in their asylum interviews. Almost all Chinese migrants are released into the United States under current leadership. In the first seven months of 2023, Border Patrol apprehended almost 10,000 Chinese border crosses, and of those 9,783, only 14 were deported.
