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Washington — As the U.S marks the 80th anniversary of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, thousands of Chinese immigrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, mostly for the same reasons as their countrymen did more than a century ago. 

Zhongwei Wang made that journey this spring through Central America with his family.

“When I knew there was a way to leave China, I felt overjoyed, really overjoyed,” he said. 

According to the U.S. Border Patrol, from January through September, more than 24,000 Chinese migrants crossed the border without authorization, about 13 times the number recorded during the same period last year. 

“They see a lack of opportunity. They see the Chinese economy stagnating. There’s also been a lot of frustration with how controlling the Chinese government is, how many restrictions there are on their lives, and people have been researching how to get to the United States,” said Madeline Y. Hsu, a history professor at the University of Maryland. 

Hsu spoke at CRCEA80, the gathering on December 5 of nearly 400 representatives from 121 Chinese-American organizations who came together to mark the 80th anniversary of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only U.S. law that prohibited immigration based solely on race. 

Wang’s journey 

Wang arrived with his parents, his wife, and their two children in May. They left China’s Anhui province, he told VOA’s Mandarin Service, because of the Chinese government’s aggressive COVID-19 lockdown and human rights issues.

The family flew from Hong Kong to Turkey to Quito, Ecuador, which offers a 90-day visa exemption for Chinese passports. 

From there, they walked through the Darien Gap, a dangerous path in the mountainous jungle between Colombia and Panama that tens of thousands of migrants used in 2022 on their way to the U.S. “We had to climb four hills on the first day,” he said. 

His wife was carrying her 14-month-old son on her back. His mother, who was in poor health, couldn’t walk after climbing the first hill, but a fellow migrant helped along the way.

Those without the means to obtain a visa sometimes choose this dangerous route. Wang said he originally planned to apply for a tourist visa to come to the United States, but at that time the waiting list for a tourist visa interview to the United States was more than six months.

While he said he objected to China’s COVID-19 lockdown policies and human rights record, he had also protested against the Chinese government after he arrived in the U.S., which prompted local law enforcement to visit his uncle’s home in China. 

“We must not stop [protesting the Chinese government] overseas, despite their threats to intimidate my family, my uncle, and the others. So, when we are overseas, we cannot keep a low profile. If we don’t speak out when [our families] are threatened, they [the Chinese government] know this method is effective and they will threaten others again,” he said.

Chinese Exclusion Act 

The Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed in 1882, was the only law in U.S. history that singled out a specific ethnic group. President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially ended the act on Dec. 17, 1943, and granted Chinese Americans equal citizenship rights for the first time. 

Renata Castro, a Florida-based immigration lawyer, says today’s Chinese migrants, if they are unable to come to the U.S. with an existing visa, are finding other ways to flee the world’s second-most populous nation, including showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. 

“Mainly because these are individuals that are escaping the oppressions of the Chinese government. … But most importantly, they are fleeing the lack of economic expectations they have in China right now,” she said.

When people come to the U.S. seeking protection because they have suffered persecution or are afraid that they will suffer persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular group, they are permitted to file for asylum regardless of their immigration status.

But to apply for asylum, a person must be present in the U.S.  

Chinese migrants who cross into the U.S. without authorization usually wait for agents from U.S. Border Patrol to pick them up. Once the agents process these migrants, many are assigned court dates and released in cities close to their final destination, adding to an immigration court system that is taking about five years to decide cases. 

According to October data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Chinese migrants were granted asylum nearly 67% of the time in immigration courts over the past two decades — one of the highest rates by nationality. The reasons, per the Christian nonprofit ChinaAid, is the continuing decline in human rights conditions, higher accessibility to information on social media about crossing the U.S. Mexico border, and restrictions on religious freedom. 

Out of 108,273 Chinese migrant applications, 77,711 were granted asylum. Asylum was denied to 29,635 and 927 applications received another type of immigration relief. 

VOA’s Tracy Wen Liu contributed to this report. 
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Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, Iranian-backed proxies have ratcheted up attacks on U.S. service members in the Middle East, and Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have attacked several military and commercial ships with ballistic missiles and drones. VOA Pentagon Correspondent Carla Babb reports.
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Washington — Iranian-American activists seeking to oust former Iranian officials from U.S. academia to hold them accountable for the Islamic republic’s poor human rights record say a U.S. college that suspended one former official last month needs to do more. 

Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists (AAIRIA) also tells VOA that the suspension of Mohammad Jafar Mahallati at Ohio’s Oberlin College has emboldened the nonprofit group to target a second former Iranian official for removal from another U.S. higher education institution. 

Oberlin told U.S. media earlier this month that it put Mahallati on indefinite administrative leave on November 28. It provided no reason for the move. 

Mahallati served as Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. from 1987-89. He then left the Iranian government for teaching and research roles at several U.S. and Canadian universities, including New York’s Columbia University in the 1990s, before joining Oberlin as a religion professor in 2007. 

AAIRIA activists, who include former political prisoners and relatives of executed dissidents in Iran and other human rights advocates, had campaigned for years for Oberlin to remove Mahallati. They accuse him of covering up Iran’s 1988 mass killings of jailed dissidents while he served as its envoy to the U.N. 

In an October 2020 statement to The Oberlin Review, a student-run weekly newspaper at the college, Mahallati said: “I categorically deny any knowledge and therefore responsibility regarding mass executions in Iran when I was serving at the United Nations.” He did not respond to a VOA email sent to his gmail address on December 15 seeking further comment for this report. 

AAIRIA member Lawdan Bazargan, whose brother was among those killed in the 1988 mass executions, discussed Mahallati’s case in the latest edition of VOA’s Flashpoint Iran podcast. She also elaborated on AAIRIA’s next demands of Oberlin and her group’s goal of securing the removal of former Iranian diplomat Seyed Hossein Mousavian as a scholar at New Jersey’s Princeton University. 

Oberlin responded to a VOA email about Bazargan’s interview by saying it has no comment. The Oberlin Review reported earlier this year that in 2021, the college hired an “unnamed third party” to investigate whether Mahallati covered up the 1988 mass killings. It said the college concluded based on the findings that there was “no evidence to corroborate” the accusation.

Mousavian served as Iran’s ambassador to Germany from 1990-97 and then in a series of other diplomatic and national security roles until leaving the government to join Princeton in 2009. He did not respond to a VOA email, sent Friday to his Princeton address, seeking reaction to Bazargan’s comments. 

In an article published last month, Princeton Alumni Weekly said Mousavian sent it an email saying: “All my books, articles, speeches, and interviews during 13 years working at Princeton University are about peace, security, stability, and opposing wars and warmongering.”

The following transcript of Bazargan’s December 14 interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

VOA: What is your reaction to Mahallati’s denial that he covered up the 1988 mass killings in Iran when he served as Iranian ambassador to the U.N.?

Lawdan Bazargan, Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists: His position always had been that he did not know. So, we gathered more documents, sending them to [rights group] Amnesty International. 

Amnesty International in February 2023 issued its latest report that documented this atrocity. It previously reported [in 2018] that in the first three weeks of July 1988, the Iranian regime had killed members of [opposition group] Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) and then paused for two weeks [before starting a second wave of killings in late August 1988]. 

Amnesty International’s latest report says the organization released its first alert about the atrocity during that pause [on August 16, 1988]. So Mahallati had 11 days to save at least the opposition leftists [from being killed]. Four thousand MEK members already had been killed. But 1,000 leftists, including my brother, could have been saved if he had spoken up, which he did not. 

VOA: You said that you want to see Oberlin College do more than just suspend Mahallati. What are the next steps that you would like to see?

Bazargan: We want to make sure that he does not receive a pension, that Oberlin College creates a memorial in the memory of our loved ones, and that a course is taught at the college about the Iranian regime and its atrocities in the same way that we teach about Nazism and what Stalin did in Russia. We have to teach that the reason behind all the atrocities and wars in the Middle East is actually the Islamic republic of Iran, and they have to be punished for what they did. 

VOA: What is your expectation about whether the college will do these things?

Bazargan: For the past three and a half years, people have been telling us it is impossible [to remove Mahallati from Oberlin]. They said, ‘He has a tenure, there is no way you guys can do it.’ And we did it. 

I am sure that it will take time and effort [to achieve our next goals], but we will go for them. And we will go after other apologists of the Islamic regime of Iran, like Mousavian at Princeton and others.
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Israel continues its military operations against Hamas and its allies ahead of one of Christianity’s major holidays. But in the United States, officials warn of heightened threats due to the conflict in Gaza. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has the story.
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