Russians fleeing for U.S. in record numbers
LOS ANGELES — Last fall, Iuliia Shuvalova and Sergei Ignatev, a young Russian couple, sold their car and took out a loan to pay for a holiday at a beach resort on Mexico’s Riviera Maya.
But they were not going on vacation. And they did not intend to return to Russia.
Once in Cancun, the couple purchased flights to Tijuana, a city just across the border from San Diego, and stayed there just long enough to buy a used car with a California license plate. At 4 a.m. on Dec. 2, they joined a line inching toward the U.S. border station in their $3,000 black Chrysler 200.
Shuvalova, 24, a political activist, said they were immediately honest with the U.S. officers when they reached the inspection booth. “Sorry, we are Russians,” she told them. “We need asylum.”
At least 2 million Ukrainians have fled Russia’s assault on their nation to neighboring countries, and Russians, too, have been pouring out of their country in recent weeks amid crushing economic sanctions and a severe clampdown on public dissent. But a Russian exodus to the United States was already well underway, according to tallies on border crossings over the past year, as the number of Russians seeking asylum on the southern border grew to the highest numbers in recent history.
More than 4,100 Russians crossed the border without authorization in the 2021 fiscal year, nine times more than the previous year. This year, the numbers are even higher — 6,420 during the first four months alone.
Ukrainians have also been crossing in greater numbers, with 1,000 apprehensions in the first four months of fiscal 2022 — some as recent as this week — compared with 676 in 2021.
Several factors
Like Shuvalova and Ignatev, many of the newly arriving Russians are supporters of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and said that they no longer felt safe in their homeland. They include LGBTQ people and religious minorities, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were ostracized and harassed.
“I get calls every other day; people have been fleeing Russia like crazy,” said Anaida Zadykyan, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles who has been helping Russians file asylum claims.
“Politically, the times in Russia are worse than during Stalin; people are living in terror,” said Zadykyan, who grew up in Moscow. “Economically, there is no money. People feel they can’t survive.”
The spike in Russian migration across the southern border coincides with a confluence of factors that have rendered it virtually impossible for Russians to enter the United States directly, and the number of asylum-seekers soared in the months leading up to the invasion of Ukraine.
Strained relations between the United States and Russia had hobbled visa processing at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, as consular operations had also halted in nearby countries under pandemic shutdowns. All that limited legal options for reaching the United States, while Russians could still enter Mexico with relative ease, needing only a visa they obtained electronically.
Some Ukrainians have arrived at the U.S. border in the days since the Russian invasion began driving millions out of the country, though exact numbers have not yet been made public.
A mother and three children who showed up at the border in San Diego on Wednesday were refused entry, according to an immigrant advocate familiar with the case, but the U.S. authorities informed the family the following day that they would be allowed to enter.
Ukrainians in the United States have been inundating immigration lawyers with calls asking how they can sponsor relatives stranded in Poland and other countries. “There is newfound panic, and demand is overwhelming,” said Jeff Khurgel, a Russian-speaking lawyer in Irvine, California. U.S. consulates in some European cities have begun expediting visas, he said.
Russians and Ukrainians represent only a fraction of all the people crossing the southern border. But unlike most migrants from Mexico and Central America, who have often been turned away since the beginning of the pandemic, they are being allowed to make asylum claims at ports of entry. And while a vast majority of asylum cases are ultimately denied, two-thirds of those from Russia and Ukraine have been winning their cases, according to government data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
‘Oh, more Russians’
Before deciding to seek asylum in the United States, Shuvalova and Ignatev said, they had participated in activities organized by supporters of Navalny in their hometown, Ulyanovsk.
“We saw with our own eyes people being beaten and arrested; we could be next,” said Shuvalova, a chemist, sitting beside her husband, a chef, on a recent afternoon.
The couple tried to gain entry to Poland, only to be refused visas. So they turned to social networks, where people were swapping information about how to enter the United States via Mexico.
They told their families that they were planning a beach vacation in Mexico.
“They would never understand the truth. They think we are zombies, programmed by Western propaganda,” Shuvalova said.
In late November, the couple boarded a charter flight from Moscow to Cancun, with two carry-ons and one suitcase between them. The flight was full, the couple recalled.
They spent a few nailbiting days in Cancun arranging travel to Tijuana after getting a tip that the Mexican authorities had been arresting Russians in hotels. At the border town, they bought a car and, with the help of GPS, made their way to the border.
As their car crawled toward the checkpoint, Shuvalova said, she was trembling.
When they reached the window and requested asylum, “the American officers chuckled and replied, ‘Oh, more Russians,’ ” she recalled, before instructing them to pull to the side.
After two days in detention, the couple was bused to a San Diego shelter with a notice to appear in immigration court, their throwaway car impounded by U.S. authorities.
Watching events unfold in Ukraine and Russia, they have been horrified but also especially grateful that they left their homeland, even though some relatives call them “traitors,” Ignatev said. The couple are expecting their first child, who will be an American.