You Might Also Like: Things That Go Boom

**Aria Young** (0:03)
It's August 8th, 2024, at 8.3 in the morning. Ah Long is coming from China, and he's just climbed over a hill on the U.S.-Mexican border by Mexicali. He checks the map. This should be America now, the steep rocky hills behind him, an abandoned California railroad runs all the way to the horizon. After three months of risking his life, depleting his savings, and getting captured by immigration police seven times, Ah Long has finally reached the land of his dreams.
Now what?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:44)
A massive surge of migrants flooding across the southern border from a country that you may not expect. They are Chinese.

**Lacey Healy** (0:53)
Over the course of the 2022 fiscal year, border patrol encountered over 27,000 Chinese migrants. In the next year, that number nearly doubled.
It was part of a historic wave of Chinese migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the years after COVID.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:09)
There is a serious national security concern, and we should be looking closely at individuals coming from Communist China, the United States' greatest adversary on the world stage.

**Lacey Healy** (1:19)
Young people like Ah Long braved the once unthinkable route through the Darién Gap, a perilous Central American jungle dense with dangerous wildlife, inhospitable terrain, and armed cartel forces. They call it walking the line.

**Aria Young** (1:38)
For Ah Long, the decision to leave came after a period of brutal COVID policies in China. His life crumbled during the pandemic, and so did his faith in Chinese society.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:49)
Health officials in China today confirmed an outbreak of viral pneumonia there can be transmitted by humans, raising the risk that it could spread quickly.

**Aria Young** (1:59)
Late December 2019, coronavirus infection officially began in Wuhan, China. In the years that followed, Ah Long witnessed starvation, economic destruction, and tightening government control. China implemented the Zero COVID Policy, a forceful attempt to eliminate new infection through aggressive public health measures like physically barricading people from leaving their homes.
Businesses across the country went bust. Shops closed down.
Ah Long said he was painfully unemployed for years. No matter how hard he tried, he could not find a job that sustained him. He stayed in lockdown for months in despair, having nothing to eat except rice porridge. Even after the lockdown ended, Ah Long struggled to rebuild his life in China. So he took a leap of faith, one that crossed oceans and continents, a decision he could not take back. In May 2024, Ah Long headed to America to seek asylum with nothing but a backpack and a loose plan.

**Rory Truex** (3:04)
Sadly, I think those people who made their way to the United States, they probably encountered a US that didn't quite match up to their expectations.

**Lacey Healy** (3:13)
That's Rory Truex, associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. He focuses on Chinese politics and authoritarian governments.

**Rory Truex** (3:22)
Especially now when we see this targeting of immigration and this hostility towards anybody who's an immigrant, whether it's legal or illegal.

**Lacey Healy** (3:30)
A few months after Ah Long arrived, Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term.

**SPEAKER_7** (3:36)
All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. First I will declare a national emergency at our southern border.

**Lacey Healy** (3:57)
National emergency. It's a phrase that we've been hearing more and more from the White House.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:01)
National emergency.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:02)
National emergency.

**Lacey Healy** (4:03)
National emergency. The southern border, an emergency. Crimes in DC, emergency. International tariffs, another emergency. In Trump's first month in office alone, he declared seven national emergencies. An average of what past presidents would have declared over the course of four years. These declarations are more than political drama. They're power moves to fast track policies without congressional approval. Emergencies are opportunities for control. Today, we ask what it's like to live in crisis under two global superpowers. China and the United States.
We will follow the odyssey of one man from Shanghai to New York, and hear how his life has been shaped by one emergency after another.
I'm Lacey Healy.

**Aria Young** (4:54)
I'm Aria Young.

**Lacey Healy** (4:55)
This is Things That Go Boom.
There is a lot of news right now. Immigration enforcement, AI and the future of work, questions about presidential power and the economy, big stories that move fast and can be difficult to make sense of. That's why NPRs consider this slows down, to focus on one major story at a time, what's happening, why it matters, and what you need to know. And they do it all in under 15 minutes. This is the big thing for me, because I love to listen to my news, but I don't always have a lot of time. And I love how clearly consider this explains the bigger picture, not just politics, but what those changes could mean for government, institutions, and daily life, from aliens to the Iran War and everything in between. The podcast is hosted by the award-winning journalist behind NPR's All Things Considered, who know it's not enough to just tell you what happened. They help you understand why.