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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Whats the actual deal with the Chinese illegal immigrants? Are the numbers actually high? If so are we to interpret this as the situation in China being much worse than we thought, or is it some clandestine operation? The latter seems super implausible. If the numbers of captured people are really that high I can’t imagine nobody would be caught with a suspicious gadget or spill the beans on interrogation.

There's lots of illegal Chinese immigrants. The trick is most of them come in legally for a brief stay and then just never leave. Their immigrant relatives help them get set up in America and they live relatively prosperous lives here compared to their lives in China.

And more recently many people of nationalities spanning the globe are pouring over the southern border. And a few of them are also Chinese. But presumably some other sort of Chinese people who can't easily scam the American visa system.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that, in the past five months, at least 4,300 Chinese undocumented migrants have been apprehended crossing the southern border, which amounts to more than double the number for all of the previous year.

One immigrant spoke anonymously to MSNBC about his experience, saying he feared staying in China after speaking out against government corruption. Fearing further retribution after being jailed twice, he fled, following instructions left by those before him on Chinese social networking apps. Detailed guides, videos and maps helped him make the journey largely on his own.

According to NBC, it's primarily political refugees. People who aren't feeling safe in China looking for somewhere rich and unwilling to extradite. Though it makes sense to sneak in some sleeper agents too - it's not like it's hard to procure guns or explosives in the US.

You can definitely be persecuted for speaking out, and everyone knows this. It’s also very hard to verify that you’ve been persecuted, so a whole lot of people claim refugee status who haven’t actually been persecuted.

We had a guy join my church for a few weeks, and he reported that he’d also attended Baptist, Mormon, and a whole bunch more. According to my Chinese wife accumulating a big list of churches you’ve attended is a strategy for claiming religious refugee status.

According to my Chinese wife accumulating a big list of churches you’ve attended is a strategy for claiming religious refugee status.

You can just list off different churches you've attended and pattern-match to somebody else's semi-recent claim of repression?

It didn’t make much sense to me. My best guess is trying to accumulate people that can confirm that you attended church services.

IIRC religious refugees are resettled with their coreligionists by preference.