Thursday, August 22, 2024 | 9:00 AM EDT - 9:30 AM EDT
In 2023, U.S. border officials arrested over 37,000 Chinese nationals at the southern border, ten times as many as the previous year. The trend is so pronounced that “walking the line” (走线), as the journey from Central/South America to the U.S. southern border is known on Chinese social media, has become a buzzword in Chinese society. The resulting influx of Chinese migrants into the United States has drawn the attention of mainstream U.S. media, prompting calls for policymakers to act. The Department of Homeland Security announced on July 2, 2024, that it had sent 116 Chinese migrants back to China from the United States in the first “large charter flight” in five years, and will continue to work with China on future removal flights.
In a conversation moderated by Meredith Oyen on August 13, 2024, Gil Guerra and Leland Lazarus shared information about the issues surrounding current Chinese migrants and discussed the U.S. policy responses.
Speakers
Gil Guerra
Gil Guerra is an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, where he focuses on immigration and foreign policy, migrant integration, and demographic trends at the U.S.-Mexico border. He is also the 2024 Latin America fellow with the Rising Experts Program at Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.
Prior to joining Niskanen, Mr. Guerra completed fellowships with the Aspen Institute, the Hudson Institute, and the Hertog Foundation. His academic work has been featured by the Society for Terrorism Research, and his writing has been published by Foreign Policy, Charged Affairs, and The Dispatch.
Mr. Guerra was a 2023 George J. Mitchell Scholar, earning a Master of Arts in global security and borders at Queen’s University Belfast. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with high honors in political science with a minor in philosophy from Swarthmore College.
Leland Lazarus
Leland Lazarus serves as Associate Director of National Security Policy at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute of Public Policy. He is an expert on China-Latin America relations.
From 2021 to 2022, Mr. Lazarus served as the special assistant and speechwriter to the Commander of the U.S. Southern Command. From 2016 to 2021, Mr. Lazarus was a State Department foreign service officer serving as deputy public affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean; consular officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Shenyang, China; and Pickering Fellow at U.S. Embassy Beijing and the China Desk in Washington, D.C. Mr. Lazarus is a fellow in the National Committee’s Public Intellectuals Program.
Fluent in Mandarin and Spanish, Mr. Lazarus holds an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and a B.A. from Brown University.
Moderator
Meredith Oyen
Meredith Oyen is an associate professor of U.S. history and U.S. diplomatic history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She specializes in the history of Sino-American relations, focusing her research on the role of migrants, transnational networks, and nongovernmental organizations in bilateral relations in the twentieth century. Prior to UMBC, she taught for two years at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American studies. Her book, The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War, was published by Cornell University Press in 2015.
Dr. Oyen won the 2017 CAHSS (College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science) Summer Faculty Research Fellowship (SFRF) from the Dresher Center at UMBC for her current project: Shanghai Survivors: World War Two’s Displaced Persons in Asia and the International Politics of Refugee Resettlement. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgetown University.
