Stay or leave? Under Trump, dreams fade for the Chinese who has cut us

When Pan decided to leave his homeland in early 2023, he did it with a conviction that his future no longer belonged.

While heading for America, he dreamed of a freer society, a more equitable economy and a life lived with dignity – things he said that he could never claim in China, where his home had been forcefully demolished by the local government to make room for real estate development.

To continue this dream, he embarked on a trip of thousands of kilometers from China to the equator in 2023, from where he spoke of the jungles as part of his long road. About two months later, he finally arrived in the United States.

Pan, a man with a soft voice at the end of the 1950s of a small village in the Jiangxi province in eastern China, is one of the tens of thousands of Chinese nationals who have made the same trip in recent years.

Known familiarly under the name of Zou Xian Ke, or “those who walked on the line”, they represent a new wave of migration motivated by the authoritarian tightening at home and belief – sometimes naive, often desperate – that the United States always offers a fair blow to a better life.

Their reasons for exodus varied, but their experiences once on American soil follow certain tendencies: many have been isolated by language, overwhelmed by debt and surviving the work of the concerts while they are waiting for their asylum claims to crawl through an overwhelming immigration system.

Some remain full of hope. Others collapse.

And all, now, live in the shadow of the political return of President Donald Trump – during which poor American -Chinese relations in recent years have been even more eagrant.

Pan is one of the many Chinese migrants I met for the first time two years ago. Like many groups with whom he has traveled, he is now working in a Chinese restaurant, even if he returned home, he was boosting his agricultural know-how.

In America, these skills do not translate, because the conditions of the soil are different and it does not speak English. Past lives have little money.

For a while after his arrival, Pan moved away from town in town, sleeping on borrowed sofas or pampering with other migrants. Finally, he landed in Barstow, California, a dusty industrial city.

His life today is written in a tight radius. He cooks and sometimes awaits tables in a restaurant during the day, calls video his wife and children in China at night, and repeats the routine the next day. He lives in a room attached to the kitchen.

For foreigners, and even for his family at home, Pan’s life may seem unbearably monotonous. But for him, he is not defined by what is missing, but by what is no longer present. No earthmakers. No ingenious managers. No fear of arbitrary punishment.

“My family does not understand,” he said with half a semi. “They ask why I left a comfortable life behind. But here, even if it’s simple, it’s me. It’s free.”

The feeling of Pan freedom is calm but stubborn. Two years ago, in a cramped hotel room in Quito, in Ecuador, he told me on the eve of his trip that even if he died on the way, it would be worth it.

He always says the same thing. “All this,” he repeated, “is worth it.”

Like many newcomers, Pan does not have a significant social circle – the challenges of language and cultural differences of assembly limit its life to interactions with other migrants.

Sometimes he goes to Los Angeles to join demonstrations outside the Chinese consulate. He admits that this must strengthen his request for asylum by establishing a public political dissent file. But it is also because, after decades of silence, he can.

On June 4, the anniversary of the Square Tiananmen massacre – a date failed China’s public memory by the authorities – he was held again outside the consulate by singing the slogans of the Communist Anti -Chinese Party. That day, among the familiar crowd, he spotted James.

A young man at the beginning of the thirties who came from Western China, James had traveled with Pan of Ecuador through the Darién Gap and to the American border. But if the story of Pan is that of a silent stoicism, James is more kinetic, more agitated.

After his release from an American immigration detention center, James rebounded between cash concerts in Monterey Park, a suburb of Chinese capital letters east of Los Angeles. He finally bought a van, went to Palm Springs and made the car both of his livelihoods and his house.

The van is crowded with sleeping bags, gas cans and a portable charger – that’s all it needs to settle for its life. During the day, he delivers food around the city; At night, it is deposited outside a 24 -hour gym and sleeps with the open windows.

James has always been a howl in China. But after I am comfortable, the economy and the political repression left little room to breathe, he decided to leave.

“At least your hard work here brings hope, but in China, you could work more than ten hours a day and see no future,” said James.

However, hope alone is not enough. For almost all newcomers, including James and Pan who are content with their lives to the United States, Trump’s political return has brought a sense of gnawing instability.

The wave of raids of immigration and customs application (ICE) across southern California, Trump’s continuous push to expel undocumented immigrants and the rise in American China tensions, including a battle on commercial prices, have all deepened a climate of paranoia.

While I reconnected with the migrants I met for the first time in 2023, clashes between demonstrators and government police were held in downtown Los Angeles during the recent ice raids.

The raids were part of the president’s goal to promulgate the “greatest expulsion operation” in the history of the United States – a commitment that helped him win the White House again last year. A CBS News / Yougov survey carried out in early June revealed that 54% of Americans said they had approved its expulsion policy.

The administration claims that its raids have mainly targeted people with judicial lockers, although criticism say that innocent people have been taken in the campaign – arousing anxiety among migrants.

Almost all the migrants with which I have now reconnected what is called a job authorization document (EAD) which allows them to work legally in the United States, but they did not obtain the official asylum status. In Trump’s vast ice raid campaign, people who have exactly the same status as these migrants have been arrested.

But what is conduct, fear is a feeling of non-no and no way-if and when these raids reach the Chinese community, or when the next slowdown in China-US relations could be.

Between the two Trump presidents, American-Chinese relations have just improved when Joe Biden served in the White House. The democrat kept Trump’s prices in place earlier, and tensions increased while Beijing increased his rhetoric on the status of We Ally Taiwan.

For some, all the discomfort has aroused the question that many Chinese migrants have quietly started to ask: America is worth it?

Kevin, a man in the thirties of the Chinese province of Fujian, did not think so. Like Pan and James, Kevin traveled through Latin America to reach the United States. But the American dream in which he once believed now looks like a mirage.

When I asked him how much he was installed in the San Gabriel valley in California, where he lives with his wife and their newborn son, he referred to the Ice Raids in Los Angeles and replied: “Everything is uncertain. So no, I don’t feel installed.”

Kevin’s disillusionment is deep. “America, for me, has the impression of becoming another China,” he said. “A Darwinian company.”

“If I had known what it really looks like, I might not have come,” he continued.

For a long time, what linked all these migrants was the journey they shared on this treacherous road.

But now, this binding has an additional layer: the emotional current that they now swim against two years after their arrival in the United States. It is the creeping awareness that their place in America is precarious, that the country on which they bet may not have space for them after all.

The Zouxian wave was motivated by despair – but also by an almost childish faith in the American idea: that this country, for all its faults, has always offered a stroke of dignity. Delivery work. A earth ribbon. A bed behind a restaurant where no one came to hit the night.

Now, with Trump depicting China as a national security threat, warning of “infiltration” and promising radical repairs on many things related to China, even these modest hopes feel more than ever in the siege.

The effect is clear. This new wave of Chinese migrants – many of which are still waiting for asylums – now feels taken in a pliers: wary of Americans, undesirable by Beijing, and sometimes suspended in the legal limbo.

Pan, for its part, is preparing for the worst. “The future here no longer feels as certain,” he said, standing outside the Barstow restaurant, looking at the traffic in the blurred highway. “I’m afraid of not being allowed to stay. And if I go back to China …”

It goes out. For a while, he didn’t say anything. Then he looked at me, stable, calm, resigned.

“This thought,” he said, “is unbearable.”

It was the same look that I remembered this hotel room in Quito, two years old and a world: the concern is triggered behind the tired eyes, but below, a core of absolute resolution.

No matter what’s going on, Pan told me, he stays.