It was 7 a.m. on a Friday when Wang Gang, a 36-year-old Chinese immigrant, jostled for a day job in New York City’s Flushing neighbourhood.

When a potential employer pulled up near the street corner, home to a Chinese bakery and pharmacy, Mr. Wang and dozens of other men swarmed around the car. They were hoping to be picked for work on a construction site, at a farm, as a mover — anything that would pay.

Mr. Wang had no luck, even as he waited for two more hours. It would be another day without a job since he crossed the southern U.S. border illegally in February, seeking better financial prospects than he had in his hometown of Wuhan, China.

The daily struggle of Chinese immigrants in Flushing is a far cry from the picture former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have sought to paint of them as a coordinated group of “military-age” men who have come to the United States to build an “army” and attack America.

Since the start of the year, as the Chinese newcomers have been trying to find their footing in the U.S., Mr. Trump has alluded to “fighting-age” or “military-age” Chinese men at least six times and suggested at least twice that they were forming a migrant “army.” It’s a talking point that is being amplified in conservative media and on social platforms.

“They are coming in from China — 31,000-32,000 over the last few months — and they are all military age and they mostly are men,” Mr. Trump said during a campaign rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, last month. “And it sounds like to me, are they trying to build a little army in our country? Is that what they are trying to do?”

As Mr. Trump and others exploit a surge in Chinese border crossings and real concerns about China’s geopolitical threat to further their political aims, Asian advocacy organisations worry the rhetoric could encourage further harassment and violence toward the Asian community. Asian people in the U.S. already experienced a spike in hate incidents fueled by xenophobic rhetoric during the COVID-19 pandemic.

‘Fuelling hate’

“Trump’s dehumanising rhetoric and blatant attacks against immigrant communities will, without question, only fuel more hate against not only Chinese immigrants but all Asian Americans in the U.S.,” Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, said in a statement.

“In the midst of an already inflamed political climate and election year, we know all too well how harmful such rhetoric can be.”

Gregg Orton, national director of the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, said many Asian American communities remain “gripped by fear” and that some Asians still feel uncomfortable about taking public transportation.

“To know that we might be staring down another round of that, it’s pretty sobering,” he said.

Mr. Wang, who travelled several weeks from Ecuador to the southern U.S. border, then spent 48 hours in an immigration detention facility before heading to Flushing, said the idea that Chinese migrants were building a military “does not exist” among the immigrants he has met.

“It is impossible that they would walk on foot for over one month” for that purpose, he said.

Immigrants in Flushing, a densely populated Chinese cultural enclave in Queens, said they came to the U.S. to escape poverty and financial losses from China’s strict lockdown during the pandemic, or to escape the threat of imprisonment in a society where they could not speak or exercise their religion freely. Many said they continue to struggle to get by. Life in the U.S. is not what they had imagined.

Since late 2022 — when China’s three-year COVID-19 lockdown began to lift — the U.S. has seen a sharp rise in the number of Chinese migrants. In 2023, U.S. authorities arrested more than 37,000 Chinese nationals at the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 10 times the previous year’s number. In December alone, border officials arrested 5,951 Chinese nationals on the southern border, a record monthly high, before the number trended down during the first three months of this year.

The U.S. and China just recently began cooperating again to deport Chinese immigrants who were in the country illegally.

Yet with tens of thousands of Chinese newcomers who have crossed into the U.S. illegally, there has been no evidence that they have tried to mount a military force or training network.

Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, said in an emailed statement that every American should be concerned about military-age Chinese men crossing into the U.S.

“These individuals have not been vetted or screened, and we have no idea who they are affiliated with or what their intention is,” Mr. Cheung said. “This sets a dangerous precedent for bad actors and potentially nefarious individuals to exploit Joe Biden’s porous border to send countless military-aged men into the United States completely unfettered.”

China has said it strongly opposes illegal immigration, and police there have arrested some who have tried to leave. Social media posts that offer advice and guides to come to the U.S. illegally have been censored in China. Instead, there are posts warning about dangers along the way and racial discrimination in the U.S.

China’s Foreign Ministry said that Mr. Trump’s claims of a Chinese migrant army were “an egregious mismatch of the facts.” The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

The young Chinese man looked lost and exhausted when Border Patrol agents left him at a transit station. Deng Guangsen, 28, had spent the last two months traveling to San Diego from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, through seven countries on plane, bus and foot, including traversing Panama’s dangerous Darién Gap jungle.

“I feel nothing,” Mr. Deng said in the San Diego parking lot, insisting on using the broken English he learned from the Harry Potter film series. “I have no brother, no sister. I have nobody.”

Mr. Deng is part of a major influx of Chinese migration to the U.S. on a relatively new and perilous route that has become increasingly popular with the help of social media. Chinese people were the fourth-highest nationality, after Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Haitians, crossing the Darién Gap during the first nine months of this year, according to Panamanian immigration authorities.

Chinese asylum-seekers, as well as observers, say they are seeking to escape an increasingly repressive political climate and bleak economic prospects.

They also reflect a broader presence of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border — Asians, South Americans and Africans — who made September the second-highest month of illegal crossings and the U.S. government’s 2023 budget year the second-highest on record.

The pandemic and China’s COVID-19 policies, which included tight border controls, temporarily stemmed the exodus that rose dramatically in 2018 when President Xi Jinping amended the constitution to scrap the presidential term limit. Now emigration has resumed, with China’s economy struggling to rebound and youth unemployment high. The United Nations has projected China will lose 3,10,000 people through emigration this year, compared with 1,20,000 in 2012.

It has become known as runxue, or the study of running away. The term started as a way to get around censorship, using a Chinese character whose pronunciation spells like the English word “run” but means “moistening.”

‘Reflecting despair’

“This wave of emigration reflects despair toward China,” Cai Xia, editor-in-chief of the online commentary site of Yibao and a former professor at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.

“They’ve lost hope for the future of the country,” said Ms. Cai, who now lives in the U.S. “You see among them the educated and the uneducated, white-collar workers, as well as small business owners, and those from well-off families.”

Those who can’t get a visa are finding other ways to flee the world’s most populous nation. Many are showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. The Border Patrol made 22,187 arrests of Chinese for crossing the border illegally from Mexico from January through September, nearly 13 times the same period in 2022. Arrests peaked at 4,010 in September, up 70% from August. The vast majority were single adults.

The popular route to the U.S. is through Ecuador, which has no visa requirements for Chinese nationals. Migrants from China join Latin Americans there to trek north through the once-impenetrable Darién and across several Central American countries before reaching the U.S. border. The journey is well-known, and has its own name in Chinese: zouxian or walk the line.

The monthly number of Chinese migrants crossing the Darién has been rising gradually, from 913 in January to 2,588 in September. For the first nine months of this year, Panamanian immigration authorities registered 15,567 Chinese citizens crossing the Darién. By comparison, 2,005 Chinese people trekked through the rainforest in 2022, and just 376 in total from 2010 to 2021.

Short video platforms and messaging apps provide not only on-the-ground video clips but also step-by-step guides from China to the U.S., including tips on what to pack, where to find guides, how to survive the jungle, which hotels to stay at, how much to bribe police in different countries and what to do when encountering U.S. immigration officers.

Translation apps allow migrants to navigate through Central America on their own, even if they don’t speak Spanish or English. The journey can cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, paid for with family savings or even online loans.

It’s markedly different from the days when Chinese nationals paid smugglers, known as snakeheads, and traveled in groups.

Search for a way in

Migrants hoping to enter the U.S. at San Diego wait for agents to pick them up in an area between two border walls or in remote mountains east of the city covered with shrubs and large boulders.

Many migrants are released with court dates in cities nearest their final destination in a bottlenecked system that takes years to decide cases. Chinese migrants had an asylum grant rate of 33% in the 2022 budget year, compared with 46% for all nationalities, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearing house.

Catholic Charities of San Diego uses hotels to provide shelters for migrants, including 1,223 from China in September. The average shelter stay is a day and a half among all nationalities. For Chinese visitors, it’s less than a day.

In September, 98% of U.S. border arrests of Chinese people occurred in the San Diego area.

In recent weeks, Chinese migrants have filled makeshift encampments in the California desert as they wait to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities to make asylum claims.