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Meredith Oyen is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on the history of U.S.-China relations, particularly on the role of migrants and migration in shaping foreign policy. Her book, The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War, was published in 2015. In 2024, she testified as an expert witness in a House of Representatives hearing on Chinese migrants to the U.S.. The following is an edited transcript of our recent conversation.

Q: In your research, why do you say that migration policy has played an important part in U.S.-China diplomacy?

A: There are a lot of ways that migration and foreign policy intersect. One of them is something as basic as people moving back and forth, giving information about the place that they’re coming from and going to. That exchange of information helps shape how people think about the other country. We have lots of people who have families back in China, Americans going to China, Chinese coming here. All of them are helping to not only shape their own impressions of the other country, but those of everyone they meet.

Deportation policy is fundamentally a foreign policy. It’s a foreign relations act. You cannot deport someone to a country you do not have foreign relations with, and you have to have cooperation in order to deport them. That was the case last year when there was the first deportation flight from the U.S. to China since 2018, a product of a lot of backroom diplomacy to try and get those restarted.

Refugee policy can affect foreign relations. Naming people fleeing one country to another as refugees can be a very political act. The definition of a refugee can shift based on the international context and situation. For example, in the Cold War, a refugee for the United States was anyone fleeing Communism; that was the formal definition. We didn’t really pay attention to other kinds of refugees, and even went out of our way, in parts of the Cold War, to avoid classifying certain groups of Asians as refugees, because it was a very Europe-centric policy.

Immigration laws — who you admit, who you restrict, and how you admit or restrict them — are pieces of foreign policy. We don’t think of them that way. We focus mostly on what it does to the domestic context. But, in fact, you’re telling other nations who is welcome and who is not. And at certain points in our history, we have been very explicit about certain whole nations not being welcome. China is, of course, the first and biggest example of that, with the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Naturalization can play into foreign policy as well, like whether or not you’re going to allow dual nationality. Some of the logistics of that include whether naturalized Chinese in the United States might get claimed as Chinese nationals regardless. Does that mean that they would have dual loyalties? Does that mean that they have competing concerns?

Remittances can be a big part of foreign economic policy too. How do remittances affect the country they’re being sent to? How do they affect the United States, in terms of capital fleeing from the United States? During the Cold War, there were questions about sending remittances to China under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Just about any topic you can come up with in the world of immigration policy is also foreign policy. So we need to think of those two things together, alongside domestic issues.

In recent years there was a large influx of migrants from China arriving at the southern border of the U.S.. What dynamics drove that trend?

In late 2022, early 2023, the U.S. Border Patrol noted a sudden and massive increase in the number of encounters with Chinese nationals. By-and-large, they were presenting themselves to request asylum at the border. The increase was exponential, and then it just kept growing over the course of 2023. It sort of peaked out in late 2023, but it was still pretty high in 2024.

People really sat up and took notice. Why are there suddenly so many Chinese nationals coming to the United States, but also coming in this particular way? And the answer to that is multifold. As you can imagine, with migration, there’s never one simple explanation, but there’s a bunch of things that come together.

The end of the zero-Covid policy in China in December of 2022 makes it easier to travel, and gives an opportunity to leave. But there’s still restrictions like exit authorizations, and getting visas to the United States, that make the process of just buying a plane ticket and entering the United States legally tricky for a certain group of people that look like they might be more interested in long-term migration.

So as the first wave of people goes out of China, they discover this path that had been paved mostly by Colombians and Venezuelans in the two or so years before. During the pandemic, they were coming from South America, going up through the Darién Gap and over land to the southern U.S. border.

As it happens, Ecuador had visa-free entry for Chinese nationals. So Chinese migrants would fly to Ecuador, and from there, they could find people to help take buses or whatever else to the Darién Gap, and then go through the jungle over land on foot, and then up to the United States. As people did this successfully, they started sharing information online.

The reasons for leaving China that people cited most often were the economic situation after Covid and their concerns about economic growth. There were a lot of middle class, entrepreneurial, small business people who had essentially gotten wiped out during the pandemic. They saw no recourse for rebuilding their lives in China and thought that they could go somewhere else and make a go of it. In a lot of cases, they were very frustrated and angry about the ways in which their businesses were left to die by certain policies, and then they grew in anger against the Chinese government.

…the current policies towards immigration and visas are undermining the progress we might have made through on-the-ground contact between Chinese and American people. So we are at a state where [U.S.] immigration policy is starting to undermine the relationship and not helping it.

There’s also a sense of a political tightening under Xi Jinping that has been very visible in Xinjiang and Hong Kong especially. There were slightly disproportionate numbers of people from those regions who came through Ecuador. But there’s other people who feel like there’s been a tightening, and that they have less ability to speak out on things, and that there is less room for disagreement, that there’s less room to get recourse from the government if something happens.

Since the peak of that migration wave, there have been several policy changes that stemmed the flow. Did any of those policy changes come from diplomacy?

A couple things happen roughly the same time in the summer of 2024. President Biden changed the U.S. border asylum policy by limiting the number of people who could come and claim asylum on any given day until the numbers dropped, and that made a significant difference. It left people stranded in northern Mexico waiting, but it definitely resulted in a drop in the number of asylum seekers.

The Chinese and Ecuadorian governments negotiated and agreed to end visa-free entry for a time. There were still other ways you could do this. You could fly to Bolivia and get a visa on arrival. But it was less easy than it once was.

And then the United States and China negotiated a reopening of deportation flights. It’s been a number of years since the U.S. had mass deportations directly to China. They managed to get this first flight of over 100 people to leave the United States and go directly back to China, and that meant that there was a greater chance that you would be sent back. That matters, because if deportations aren’t going, then even if you don’t get permission to stay legally, you also might not be forced to leave.

These factors all worked together to lead to a diminishing of the numbers over the course of 2024, and then this year, the changeover to the Trump administration basically choked it off.

What do you think precipitated China’s willingness to reopen cooperation on deportation flights, and might this lead to more corruption in other areas?

Part of the willingness was that the sheer volume of people coming got international attention. It was in the news because it was so novel. Everyone’s used to reporting about the Darién Gap, and there had been a couple years of reports on the Venezuelans and Colombians coming via that route. People are used to a problem on the southern border. But the sudden influx of Chinese people who are migrating in that way was novel. It was attention-grabbing because of the strained relations between the United States and China, and it caught the attention of people who are both sympathetic and not sympathetic to China.

For example, in spring last year, then-candidate Trump commented that all these young men are coming from China across the border, and they’re coming to build an army in the United States. That is, on its face, ridiculous. However, it caught a lot of attention, and it led to a hearing in the House about whether the Chinese are plotting something, and whether the Chinese government is sending in spies as asylum seekers over the southern border. There was, in turn, a backlash. There were remarks from the Chinese Embassy saying, we don’t really appreciate this characterization of us.

The international attention to it created a negative perception of China, that China was then motivated to shift. That made it a little bit easier to make the negotiations for the direct deportation flights.

As to whether that leads to a better relationship, I would love to think so. I have my doubts right now, and that is because there are a lot of other factors at play, and the trade war and tariff situation is undermining a lot of the good that has been done in all these other ways in which we have state-to-state interactions with China. And the current policies towards immigration and visas are undermining the progress we might have made through on-the-ground contact between Chinese and American people. So we are at a state where immigration policy is starting to undermine the relationship and not helping it.

Including the example of Trump’s claims about the migrants, how do national security concerns, real or not, play a role in the current U.S. political stance on Chinese migration?

The accusation against the Chinese coming over the border is that they might be, one, spies or building some sort of army; two, that they’re smuggling fentanyl and therefore undermining the United States by contributing to the opioid crisis; or three, they are, in other ways, members of gangs who are violent and whatever else. There has been some discussion of this from Congress and from the President, and certainly from his campaign last year, as they were going through the process of targeting immigration as a major issue.

Linked into that is the fact that there’s suspicion of Chinese nationals who are students and scholars in the United States. There’s concerns that the Chinese students are trying to break into U.S. military facilities. There were a few people who were arrested trying to get into a military facility. There have been a couple of these incidents of people on student visas doing something that is either spying or appears on the surface like spying.

There’s also been suspicion about scholars taking information and scientific knowledge, milking the U.S. scientific community dry, and sending it back to China to benefit China and not the United States. That led to the Justice Department’s China Project during the first Trump Administration to investigate Chinese scholars and the contacts between U.S. scholars and China.

The combination implies that anyone who’s Chinese is potentially a threat for the United States, because even if they are not part of this irregular migration or in the scientific community as a student or scholar, they might have family back in China that could be pressured in a way that would cause the person in the United States to want to spy. It’s created this atmosphere that a Chinese migrant of any kind — short term, long term, tourist, non-tourist — might be a potential threat.

There was a recent bill in the House to ban all student visas for Chinese nationals to come to the United States. And that’s the thinking that’s building into that. That legislation won’t pass, but it’s disheartening that it was introduced.

What are the historical analogs of these sorts of national security concerns?

If we go all the way back to the anti-Chinese movement leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a lot of that anti-Chinese fervor had to do with economic and cultural concerns that we don’t normally associate with national security. But later on, the perception of people who are of a certain descent being a national security threat gets more play during World War II, and then the Cold War.

…whether we admit it or not, we kind of need the Chinese people who come to the United States. We need them in universities, whether we like it or not. We need them in the tech industry. Wherever they are, we kind of need that labor. 

During World War I, under the Alien Enemies Act, German nationals came under investigation or arrest for having supposed loyalties to Germany. In World War II, you had a similar situation, and that culminated with the executive order to intern Japanese Americans on the West Coast. That was a way of saying these people, by virtue of being Japanese or of Japanese heritage, are likely to have loyalties to Japan that then undermine U.S. national security. And that gets upheld in court cases during World War II.

During the Cold War, in the 1950s, the Japanese are now allies, and China has become a Communist country. So the suspicion shifts to China. This 1950s, early 1960s era of Chinese immigration history in the United States is the closest analog to modern day. During this period, having learned nothing from the internment camps of World War II, the FBI has a project to try and find names and create lists of Chinese nationals who would need to be interned in the event of a conflict with China.

There is a larger FBI surveillance of Chinese American organizations. Chinese newspaper journalists and editors who are arrested and tried for trading with the enemy because they facilitate the sending of remittances back to China. We have an embargo against China, so you cannot be sending money to the People’s Republic of China and providing them with a source of foreign exchange.

There’s also a recognition that during the exclusion era, a lot of Chinese came to the United States using an assumed name of somebody who had a right to derivative citizenship through a parent who was a citizen. So there were investigations to see who people really were, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service created a confession program to try and influence Chinese Americans to confess their real names and get their immigration status straightened out.

A lot of that came from this idea that if they don’t have real names, they could be spies. If they have family still in China, they could be spies. The family could be implored to write letters to them begging for money or things. The idea is that everyone is suspect, because if you are Chinese, you are suspect.

Parallel to that, there were Chinese scholars in the United States who came post-World War II for STEM degrees, but were then stuck, because in 1950 when the U.S. and China entered the Korean War on opposing sides, their return to China was seen as a way of bolstering Chinese capability to the detriment of U.S. national security. So those students and scholars were ordered to remain in the United States and not permitted to leave for the duration of the conflict, and for some cases beyond it.

The United States and China ended up starting ambassadorial-level talks in 1955. The official reason those talks initially started had to do with migration — to try and negotiate the return of nationals that were in each other’s countries and needed to be repatriated.

How does migration policy figure into how the Trump administration is dealing with China? Is migration diplomacy still instrumental in managing the U.S.-China relationship?

Right now, I see migration issues as having a great opportunity to be incredibly detrimental to the U.S.-China relationship. That wouldn’t make China unique, since we are blowing up our relationships with a lot of countries right now, but angering countries through tariffs and creating trade wars creates a disincentive to cooperate on deportation.

Built into our immigration law, there are incentives that the United States can use to force countries to take back their deportees. The big one is we will stop giving visas to people from your country. That’s not really a great threat right now for two reasons.

One, whether we admit it or not, we kind of need the Chinese people who come to the United States. We need them in universities, whether we like it or not. We need them in the tech industry. Wherever they are, we kind of need that labor. So that would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

And two, as you see more cases of college students being grabbed off the street and thrown into unmarked vehicles, you will also have fewer people applying to come to the United States, so lowering visa counts is not a very good incentive for cooperation.

I foresee some challenges coming with deportation, and China is significantly less likely to quickly capitulate. China has already established the fact that it can reroute its trading pathways and its trade partners quite well around the United States. So there’s going to be a reckoning here with who needs who more.

The perception of Chinese people as spies is also something that does nothing but undermine relations. It creates a barrier between Americans and Chinese getting to know each other more. There are fewer Americans incentivized to visit China. There are fewer Chinese incentivized to visit the United States. You have Chinese Americans with family back in China as being the last delicately balanced bridge between the two. And that is, historically, a recipe for more tension.

The more ways that we connect — on scientific exchanges, plus migration, plus cultural exchanges, scholastic exchanges — the more of those little links we build, the stronger a barrier we have for when something else happens. Like when there’s a transit through the Taiwan Strait that nobody likes, we have a little bit of a foundation that you could fall back on.

The dip in relations started a while ago. Now it’s plummeting again, and the way out of that is to get back into this period of exchanges. But I don’t know quite how we get there while the Trump administration is pursuing the goals it’s pursuing.

What we’re seeing right now is all those little links getting broken, and that makes it kind of scary, because it increases the possibility for a misunderstanding, and the likelihood that there will be a big response to something.

How might the tightening of U.S. immigration policy prompt China to act?

In terms of big money investment, students, exchanges, all those things, China will look elsewhere. With the first Trump administration, we saw that partly. There will definitely be ways in which China looks elsewhere, or steps into the breach and says to the world, “We’re still here and available for business.”

The ugliness of the U.S. immigration policy right now is also detrimental to the United States in terms of public diplomacy and soft power. We’re giving the parts of the world that don’t like us a really terrific propaganda line: This is how the so-called land of the free treats people; they have free speech, but not if you’re on a student visa. This is in some ways very similar to World War II, when Japan could go all the way through Asia saying, you don’t like the United States, they have an Asian exclusion law; they won’t even let you in the country. And it was hard to defend because it was true.

What historical instances can we look at in U.S.-China diplomacy and migration policy to inform the current moment, either parallels or clues as to what might come next?

It’s not history repeating itself, it’s not exactly the same, and there’s lots of differences, but there’s certainly resemblances to the early Cold War in terms of the level of suspicion and some of the especially heavy-handed domestic actions taken against Chinese migrants in the United States.

But the other historical parallel is that the United States and China had no formal diplomatic relationship between 1949 and the 1970s. In 1972, there was a small opening, then there was official recognition by the end of the decade. Then in the 1980s, you had a period where both sides wanted to get to know each other better, and that was the way out of this very tense period of the Cold War.

Interests had to align in other places, but they didn’t align perfectly by any means. The big power interests were not always in sync, but the interconnectedness increased because we had more and more ways of connecting with each other. We had waves and waves of Chinese people migrating to the United States after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and the opening up of China. And you had more and more people, Americans, going to China. It was still a small number in comparison, but you had more students going back and forth.

Something like that period of movement between the two countries is what I hope for. We’re in a rough patch right now. The dip in relations started a while ago. Now it’s plummeting again, and the way out of that is to get back into this period of exchanges. But I don’t know quite how we get there while the Trump administration is pursuing the goals it’s pursuing.

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