Dr Phil Suggests Chinese Migrants Entering US across Border Are Spies Sending ‘Farming Seeds Back’

Dr Phil McGraw has suggested that Chinese migrants crossing the border are working as spies.

The TV personality appeared on Fox News on Tuesday to discuss his recent trip to the US-Mexico border, which has seen a significant influx of Chinese migrants.

‘We would be incredibly narcissistic to assume that these people are coming in here just because they’re in the neighborhood,’ Dr Phil told Sean Hannity.

‘What are they doing? If they’re working in farming, if they’re working in industry, I promise you they are expected to do certain things. Are they spying? Are they sending seeds back from farming to China? Are they getting plans from industries they’re working on?’

While previously many of the migrants causing the US border crisis had come from central and South America, now thousands have come from China.

Over the 2023 fiscal year, which ended in September, US Customs and Border Protection reported 24,048 Chinese citizens were apprehended at the Mexico border, more than in the ten preceding years combined.

That’s up more than 10 times from the 1,970 arrests recorded during the 2022 fiscal year, and just 323 the year before, when China was under strict pandemic travel bans and lockdowns.

Last week Dr Phil slammed president Biden’s immigration policies for fueling a ‘humanitarian crisis’ at the southern border, saying it is ‘unlike anything we’ve seen before.’

The talk show host, 73, said he visited the border in Texas because he had to ‘see for myself’ the unfettered illegal immigration flooding the US.

‘More than six million illegal immigrants have crossed Texas’ Southern border in just three years,’ he said.

‘That’s more than the population of 33 different states in this country.’

It comes as tensions are rising between Texas officials and the federal government over how to halt the constant caravans, after December broke the record for migrants encountered by border officers at a staggering 302,000 incidents.

Meanwhile TikTokers have been posting videos which alert migrants to the easiest entry points.

TikTokers appear to have been undermining attempts to strengthen the defense system by advertising its weaknesses to migrants – including holes in the fence between Mexico and California.

Migrants who formed an orderly queue to cross through the hole on Sunday told 60 Minutes that they learned about the entryway thanks to a video on TikTok.

One video gives step-by-step instructions on hiring smugglers, and detailed directions to holes in the border defense.

Migrant smugglers have also been known to advertise their illegal services in exchange for cash on the Chinese-owned app.

An extensive USA Today report detailed the ways in which both migrants and human smugglers have been harnessing the power of social media to advise others making the journey and promote their services.

Other smugglers have even taken to social media to boast about how easy it is to cross the US-Mexico border.

The influx of Chinese migrants can partly be explained by the rise in popularity of the perilous Darien Gap route.

Chinese people were the fourth-highest nationality, after Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Haitians, crossing the Darién Gap during most of 2023, according to Panamanian immigration authorities.

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

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 310,000 people through emigration this year, compared with 120,000 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.’ Now it’s an internet meme.

‘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 Cai, who now lives in the US. ‘You see among them the educated and the uneducated, white-collar workers, as well as small business owners, and those from well-off families.’

The popular route to the US s 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 enough it has its own name in Chinese: walk the line, or ‘zouxian.’