In limbo: thousands of Chinese citizens stuck in US illegally, and Beijing won’t take them back
- One immigrant spent time in prison and was ordered deported but instead was later pardoned and is now a US citizen
- China’s failure to cooperate in the process has earned it a ‘recalcitrant’ label from the US Department of Homeland Security, but there is little recourse
Xiaofei “Eddy” Zheng moved from Guangzhou to California at the age of 12, fell in with Asian gangs and was convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping at 16. Finally emerging from San Quentin prison in 2005, some 19 years later, the US ordered him deported back to China. All that was required was Beijing’s sign-off and he would be gone.
For most countries, that would be routine. But the embassy refused to cooperate, claiming there was no proof Zheng was Chinese, leaving him in limbo for years.
“It was just constant fear every day. I couldn’t plan anything. I couldn’t set goals,” said Zheng, who would battle bureaucrats and deportation orders for another dozen years before gaining US citizenship in 2017. “The Chinese, it does accept people, but it’s just very selective.”
Atop the long list of US-China problems, add one more: the thousands of Chinese citizens illegally in the US that Beijing refuses to take back.
China’s failure to cooperate has seen it labelled “recalcitrant” by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS); it is one of some dozen such countries and special regions, including Eritrea, Iran, Pakistan and Cuba.
“China is obviously the biggest offender,” said Thomas Kellogg, executive director of Georgetown University’s Centre for Asian Law. “If there’s no cost in not taking them back, and the only cost is that the US keeps asking, so what?”