The southern border may connect the U.S. to Mexico, but data from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol shows it’s people from all over the world are crossing it. Including from China.

Almost 6,000 Chinese nationals had what are called land encounters with border patrol agents in December 2023. It was just more than 2,000 this March.

It's a  dramatic increase compared to March just two years ago, when there were 101 encounters with Chinese nationals.

“People are taking a very long route, going from China to Thailand to Turkey then to Ecuador and coming up through the southern border," said Grace Leem the assemblywoman who represents Lower Manhattan. She’s noticed some big changes lately in parts of her district.

“We know that the number one destination for Chinese migrants in the United States is New York City,” she said.

The data shows a trend in New York immigration courts from October 2023 through March of this year. There have been more than 130,000 notices to appear issued, which requires noncitizens to go to court for civil immigration charges.

The nationality with the second-highest number? Chinese. And 95 percent of those cases are for people entering the U.S. without inspection. The only nationality higher? Ecuador.

Immigration lawyer Ed Cuccia said his clients coming through the southern border do so because it’s easier to get a visa to a South American country than to the United States.

He said many are coming for economic reasons, which could pose challenges if they are applying for asylum because that is not grounds for asylum.

"It’s a round peg in a square hole," Cuccia said. "They don’t fit nicely into the asylum system. So it is a problem."

But whatever status they are seeking, while they wait, unlike many other recent arrivals, Chinese migrants are typically not in the city’s shelters. Instead, they are going to places with large Chinese communities like Chinatown, where some have friends or family.

“If not for that established infrastructure in the Chinese world, what we would see would be a much heavier burden on the New York structure of society,” Cuccia said.

While the city offers basic service guidelines in Chinese, Lee said she still feels like there are language barriers for immigration services offered by the city.

“And we need to make sure that the services the city is providing to migrants reflects the diversity of the migrants wo are coming in,” she said.

She said she hopes for improvement because she thinks we’ll continue seeing a lot of Chinese nationals coming to New York City.