That year, there were 2.2 million immigrants, representing nearly 10 percent of the U.S. Between 1860 and 1920, the immigrant share of the overall population fluctuated between 13 percent and almost 15 percent, peaking at 14.8 percent in 1890, mainly due to high levels of immigration from Europe.
Historically, China has been a migrant sending country: for centuries Chinese citizens, primarily laborers, have traveled to the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia in search of jobs and new lives. But the situation is evolving. More recent Chinese emigrants have been highly educated and seek employment throughout the world in the globalized era, or act as wealthy investors in the global market. Meanwhile, China has become well known as “the world’s factory” and one of the largest economies in the world. Now, it attracts great numbers of international immigrants from great a variety of countries in search of jobs and new lives. Thus China is becoming a destination country for transnational migrants rather than a source of them.Transformation from a Source Country to a Destination Country.
According to the Bureau of Exit and Entry Administration of China’s Ministry of Public Security, 26.11 million foreigners entered China in 2007 and about 2.85 million of them― more than 10 percent―came for employment. In 2007, 538,892 foreigners lived in China for longer than six months and over half of these were workers or relatives of workers in joint ventures and solely foreign-owned companies. Influenced by the financial crisis, the total number of foreigners who entered China decreased to 21.93 million in 2009, but 2.27 million of these were seeking employment. In late 2010, China conducted its sixth national population census, for the first time counting foreigners and residents of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan who were residing in mainland China. The census counted 1,020,145 people from outside mainland China, including 593,832 foreigners; 336,245 were males and 257,587 were females.Table 1. The top ten countries of foreigners residing in China. 7.France15,0873.Japan66,1598.India15,0514.Myanmar39,7769.Germany14,4465.Vietnam36,20510.Australia13,286(Data from National Bureau of Statistics of China, April 29, 2011 )A total of 412,243 of these foreign residents came from the ten nations listed in Table 1 above, with the remaining 181,589 coming from other countries.
Most foreigners were long-term residents in China: 683,101 (or 66.96 percent of the total from foreign countries, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) resided in China for at least one year. 204,962 of these came for business, 201,955 came for employment, 186,648 came for settlement, and 202,482 came for study. Therefore, if we define immigration as the movement of humans across national borders for long-term or permanent durations, we might find that approximately 796,047 international immigrants or potential immigrants were living in China in late 2010.Transnational Immigrant Communities in Chinese SocietyTransnational migrants – with both legal and illegal status – are joining Chinese society at an unprecedented scale, and in unexpected ways. International communities are beginning to emerge within Chinese society; Shanghai and Beijing Municipalities, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Fujian, Yunnan, Zhejiang, Shandong, and Liaoning Provinces, and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region are home to the largest concentrations of foreign residents.
It is estimated that Beijing’s “Korea Town,” Wangjing, is home to more than 200,000 Koreans. Approximately 50,430 Japanese lived in Shanghai for more than three months in 2010, the largest enclave of which is in the city’s Gubei district. Xinhua News reported that in 2007 the number of long-term Japanese residents was greater in Shanghai than in New York. Some communities may be a bit more unexpected. “Middle Eastern Street,” a bazaar in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province that is frequented by Muslims, is the largest international small commodities wholesale market in the world.
Guangzhou is home to a so called “African Zone” (also named “China’s Brooklyn”), where an estimated 200,000 African peddlers have lived with their families during the last decade. Also, many tourists from Western countries have been settling for years in Yunnan Province in or around the towns of Lijiang and Dali, which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, producing “local” cosmopolitans. Such waves of migration indicate a coming era of inflow transnational migrants in China.Asian female immigrants play diverse and important roles in China, as they impact both the professional and family domains.
Filipino maids are famous for domestic service around the world, and approximately 137,000 of them work in Hong Kong every year. In recent years, as more and more mainland Chinese have begun earning high incomes, thousands of Filipino maids have left Hong Kong and Taiwan to work in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.Partly as a result of the One Child Policy, the ratio of males to females in China is increasing. A shortage of females in China along with the high cost of marriage (bride price) for Chinese men has created a “marriage squeeze” in the provinces with the highest male-to-female ratios, and very high demand for potential brides for ethnic minority women in poor Southwestern provinces such as Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi. A shortage of females in China has also created a demand for “foreign brides” purchased from Russia, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar.
Illegal immigrants among the foreign brides are sometimes forced to marry poor Chinese single men, who are known as “bare branches” in society. Poor and remote villages of north China’s Henan and Shandong provinces, for example, are home to many Burmese brides; some of these villages are even dubbed “black villages” because of the Burmese women’s darker skin and smaller stature.
This “feminization” of migration has grown in recent years, and foreign brides from Asian countries are now becoming typical immigrants in China’s transnational migration era.Challenges for China’s Current Immigration Policies and LawInternational immigrants have come to comprise a fourth section of China’s population, thus reshaping a demographic structure that was divided into three sections: rural farmers, urban residents, and the floating population (internal immigrants). Moreover, the increasing numbers of the international population are a great challenge for the current Chinese immigration policies and laws.On the one hand, China has little experience with immigration and has no special law regulating transnational migrants. The Rules for Foreigner Administration, which have long focused on entry and exit procedures for short-term visitors, is ineffective for addressing the increasing long-term or even permanent transnational migrants or the three different aspects of illegal immigration ( san fei ren yuan): illegal entry, illegal residence, illegal work.The Chinese government is inexperienced in the administration of international migrants and falls short in its laws and policies relevant to transnational immigration. This is especially true with respect to the granting of “eligible status” to immigrants, which is still under strict policy control. There is a very limited quota of Chinese “green cards,” or permanent residence permits for foreign citizens, and applications for such permits are usually influenced by politics: they are primarily issued for “international friends” of the Communist Party instead of for international immigrants. Current immigration policy also tends to encourage accepting immigrants who are highly educated and can work in high-tech or bring large investments with them, as China already possesses abundant labor resources.Disadvantaged female immigrants, such as “foreign brides” who are less educated and less skilled than many migrants are therefore often not able to enter the country legally, and may do so illegally, either by their own means or through the facilitation of smugglers. Obviously, such women lack visible legal and policy support to obtain immigrant status, legal Chinese citizenship, or even an official marriage certificate.
This poses a problem for more than just the underserved and unprotected population of foreign brides: undocumented non-registered marriages and undocumented marriage immigrants stimulate the growth of human trafficking crime across China’s borders and has a negative effect on society as a whole.Toward a Legalization of Irregular Migration: Possibility and RoutesChina is not exceptional in facing and dealing with illegal or irregular migration issues, which are a serious problem for many countries. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), “most States in the world (and not just in the developing world) lack the capacity to effectively manage the international mobility of persons today, not to mention respond to new dynamics.” Even the United States, which defines itself as a nation of immigrants, still has to face “an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Some crossed the border illegally.