The Strange Path of Uzbeks to the Mexico-U.S. Border

In 1882, the United States banned Chinese immigration with the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was the country’s first significant piece of immigration legislation. Some enterprising Asian immigrants turned to the Mexican border to cross into the U.S.; it was far from the heavily demarcated and policed border it is today. At the time, Mexicans and others from Latin America criss-crossed the border with relative ease.

More than 140 years later, the southern U.S. border – despite fences, patrols, and a great number of risks – remains a path for the desperate to enter the United States – even the occasional Central Asian it turns out.

In her history of ideological roots of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, “Bad Mexicans,” Kelly Lytle Hernández writes that Chinese immigrants at the turn of the 20th century would try “to pass for Mexican, cutting their hair, donning serapes, and learning a few words of Spanish. ‘Yo soy Mexicano,’ they would say when stopped by an immigration inspector.” 

I happened to be reading Hernández’ book when reports surfaced of a group of seven Uzbeks who had allegedly been kidnapped in Mexico in mid-December and held in Gomez-Palacio, a city in northeastern Durango state. Kun.uz reported that “criminals” had demanded $1,200 from those they’d kidnapped, but additional details were not available. 

The Uzbek Foreign Ministry chimed in on December 13 merely to comment that the Uzbek Embassy in Washington D.C. had held negotiations with the Mexican Embassy in the U.S. and the National Institute for Migration, a Mexican government agency responsible for regulating migration in Mexico. Uzbekistan does not have an embassy in Mexico, nor does Mexico have an embassy in Uzbekistan. In fact, Mexico is accredited to Uzbekistan from its embassy in Tehran, Iran; Uzbekistan’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York City, rather than the embassy in D.C., is accredited to Mexico. 

The foreign ministry provided no details other than stating that the Uzbeks had been identified, were safe, and were being provided “consular and legal assistance.”

All this to say, it was a strangely murky story. Uzbekistan is a long way from Mexico.

Two days earlier, on December 11, Uzbekistan’s state security service issued a statement on Telegram that two people in Samarkand had been caught accepting a total of $20,000 in advance payments to send two other people to the United States via “illegal means.” One person was allegedly charging $25,000 to send another via Spain and Mexico into the U.S.; a second was allegedly charging a total of $30,000 to route someone via Turkey, the UAE, and then Mexico. 

The two stories themselves are not necessarily related, but there is a bigger story here. None of the reports about the kidnapped group of seven state what they were doing in Durango, but it’s a safe assumption they were headed north. Migrants of all stripes are easy targets for criminals, especially those seeking to illegally enter the United States.

On January 3, the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan joined the conversation, issuing a statement via its Telegram channel that it had “received questions about entering the United States through the U.S.-Mexico border.”

The statement read: “The U.S. Embassy warns that individuals who attempt to journey to the United States in an irregular manner put themselves at risk of becoming victims of crime, human trafficking, and financial scams. It is never safe to come to the United States through irregular channels. We encourage migrants to look into legal options for entry rather than take on the risks and dangers of irregular migration to the United States.”

Uzbek citizens wishing to travel to the United States for tourism or business require a visa. Those wishing to move permanently to the United States require, more than anything else, luck. 

In 2021, there were 466,480 Uzbek entrants in the Diversity Immigrant Visa (DV) program – commonly still called the “green card lottery – which is a U.S. State Department program that doles out a limited number of highly coveted permanent resident cards to aspiring U.S. immigrants. Counting “derivatives,” that is spouses and children, the total was nearly 833,000 Uzbeks. This was a decline from 2020 (2.6 million total) and 2019 (2.8 million), but still an extraordinary number of Uzbeks consistently express their desire to relocate to the United States.

In 2021, more Uzbeks entered the so-called Diversity Lottery than Iranians (404,863), Nepalis (421,765), and Ethiopians (401,661). Only the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) had more entrants (593,917) than Uzbekistan in 2021. In terms of total applicants (entrants plus their derivatives) only Egypt had more in the 2021 lottery: 872,505, thanks to a larger derivatives figure.

Of the countries mentioned so far, Uzbekistan and Nepal have the smallest populations, 30 million and 36 million, respectively. The others have far larger populations: Ethiopia (120 million), Egypt (109 million), DRC (96 million), Iran (88 million). 

The point here is to illustrate that desire is high in Uzbekistan to migrate to the United States. In the latest batch, just 5,511 Uzbeks “won” an opportunity to be interviewed for the coveted visa; fewer will actually get one and make the move. Uzbekistan had the third highest number of winners after Egypt and Algeria. 

When ambitions are high but opportunities minimal, people become desperate. And so, while Uzbeks are far from the majority of migrants probing the southern U.S. border for weaknesses, there are some who take the chance, and clearly others willing to make a buck off their desperation – both in Uzbekistan and in Mexico. It’s unclear how many Central Asians, if any at all, have successfully crossed into the United States this way. 

We’re far from the days when muttering “Yo soy Mexicano” was enough for an Asian to get past an immigration inspector and into the United States.