As the influx of Chinese migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border rose last year, disinformation depicting them as drug smugglers or spies for the Chinese government circulated among politicians.
Such inflammatory rhetoric has caused harm in Asian communities across the U.S. and locally.
In Arizona, Asian residents experienced more than 100 instances of racial violence during the pandemic, according to Stop AAPI Hate, an organization launched in 2020 to document anti-Asian activity and incidents of hate in the U.S. during the pandemic.
Research indicates that one-third of Asian Americans are still facing anti-Asian problems after the pandemic.
Democracy Watch researched the problem in March by Asian and Pacific Islander Vote, a nonpartisan organization representing that demographic. The group found that misleading narratives about the huge number of Chinese migrants entering the Southwest border were gaining traction online.
This research argues this increases the perceived threat against many Chinese and Asians in America. The way stories about Chinese migrants are told only intensifies the years of tension.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from April indicates that 27,700 migrants with People’s Republic of China citizenship were encountered at the Southwest border in the fiscal year that began seven months earlier.
That figure already surpassed the total number of 24,314 Chinese migrants in the entire previous fiscal year, 2023, on the border. Fiscal year 2023 had already seen 10 times the number as the prior 12 months.
In Arizona specifically, 4,155 Chinese encounters were recorded in the fiscal year of 2023, a more than 28-fold increase from 2022, when there were only 147.
Two unproven claims about these immigrants rapidly spread on social media: They are either spies of the Chinese Communist Party or the part of Chinese drug cartels smuggling fentanyl into the U.S. The Democracy Watch report defines this information as “fear-mongering narratives,” used by…
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