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This argument has never passed the smell test with me. The purpose of human intelligence (HUMINT) is to have someone who can go somewhere that satellites can't. Someone who can make quiet overtures to the Colonel who runs the jet propulsion laboratory at a party, or who can have a nice cup of tea with the professor who just published a paper on a 2.35% more efficient stealth coating in a university coffee shop without anyone raising an eyebrow. You know who can do that? The Russian "cultural attache" at the embassy, or the Chinese math savant on a student visa at MIT. It makes perfect sense for them to hang around people like the Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, or the head of the Applied Robotics Laboratory at Stanford. Some random ass nobody who was smuggled across the southern border has a much higher barrier to get access to the kind of people that HUMINT is about getting access to. That someone would try to put a sleeper cell in that way makes more sense, but again, why bother? If the Chinese government decides to set up a sleeper cell in the United States, getting three husband/wife pairs green cards isn't that hard, and the old adage of "never break more than one law at a time" has to apply doubly so to spycraft. Being on green cards means the US Government is aware of their existence yes, but the drawbacks of trying to get them over the border illegally (possibility of apprehension by Border Patrol, difficulty of getting decent-paying work, possibility of deportation at the whim of the government) all outweigh the benefits.
I remember reading about a case where the soviets did send a guy in over the Canadian border. The advantage is that he's harder to track than a known foreign national. He might have been East German, but same thing.
The guy ended up falling in love with an American woman. The soviets wanted to retract him or something but he quit his spy job for love by telling his handlers he had AIDs and would be dead soon. (This worked)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Barsky
He also did a 3 and a half hour interview with Lex Fridman.
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