GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has made illegal immigration from Mexico a cornerstone issue for his campaign. 

He has promised to build a “great” wall along our southern border to keep Mexicans from crossing illegally into the United States in order to be paid unfairly for back-breaking work as dishwashers, domestics and farmhands.

Fair enough.

Except that net immigration from Mexico is at less than zero. In other words, more people are moving back than coming here. Indeed, the pace of unauthorized immigration from Asia has surpassed that which originates in Mexico.

Now U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports an absolute explosion in the number of undocumented Chinese immigrants detained for allegedly trying to enter the United States in the agency's San Diego sector.

Maybe they need to reach their rich cousins in the San Gabriel Valley.

There were five Chinese nationals caught at the border in the San Diego region in the 2014 federal fiscal year, a CBP spokesman confirmed. There were 48 in the 2015 fiscal year. So far this fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, there have been an estimated 663 apprehensions of Chinese along that stretch of the SoCal border with Mexico.

The figures were first reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Just for the record, those stats represent a 13,160 percent increase in the number of undocumented Chinese trying to cross into Greater San Diego since 2014.

A recent Migration Policy Institute report on Chinese emigration says these folks aren't unskilled. And they pay thousands of dollars to leave their homeland in search of better work.

“High-skilled and high-value emigration from China is rising fast, while low-skilled and unskilled emigration is stagnant — a divergence that has been widening since the late 2000s,” the institute stated in a summary of that report. “The emigration rate of China’s highly educated population is now five times as high as the country’s overall rate. China’s wealthy elites and growing middle class are increasingly pursuing educational and work opportunities overseas for themselves and their families, facilitated by their rising incomes.”

So, uh, Donald, in this case they are sending us their best. Good luck with that wall.

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