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The American economy isn’t looking great right now. U.S. GDP shrank last quarter, despite a hearty showing from American consumers. Inflation is high; markets are down; both wages and personal-savings rates show some troubling statistical signals. Is the U.S. destined to have a recession in 2022? I don’t know for sure. But here are nine signs that worry me.

1. Everybody’s stock portfolio is disgusting right now. The Nasdaq is down 30 percent. Growth stocks and pandemic darlings such as Peloton and Zoom have crashed more than twice that amount. Hedge funds that backed these growth stocks, including Ark and Tiger Global, have been crushed. If you look at your 401(k), you’ll see that … no, scratch that, you should under no circumstances look at your 401(k).

“The stock market is not the economy” is a thing that some people like to say. But it’s not a very useful mode of analysis. Health care isn’t the economy either, and neither is the gross metropolitan product of Los Angeles. But if either of those things crashed by 30 percent in a quarter, we would all agree that was important. Sharp declines in equity values can trickle down through the economy in all sorts of ways, discouraging investment and spending, or leading to a contagion of layoffs.

2. The crypto bubble has popped. Crypto fans had a fun ride, powered by exuberant risk taking in an era of low interest rates. But now the car is coming down the other side of the roller coaster. As fear and interest rates spike, investors are selling off their positions and billions of dollars of value are being erased from the industry. By one estimate, more than $200 billion of stock-market wealth has been destroyed within crypto alone, in just a matter of days. The bursting of the crypto bubble seems quite reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when the Nasdaq crashed and the effects reverberated throughout the economy, wiping out retail investors and pulling down business investment until we ended up in a brief recession. If the crypto bubble popping were the only thing happening right now, I don’t think a recession would be likely. Except it’s not even close to the only (or even the most important) thing happening right now.

3. Inflation is very high and broad-based, and that’s bad. This week’s inflation headlines were a bit confusing. The Wall Street Journal reported that inflation had “eased.” The New York Times reported that prices are “rising rapidly,” at a pace close to a 40-year record. Who’s right? They both are. The rate of price increases is declining, but the level of price increases is still extremely high and frustratingly broad-based. Several months ago, some economists offered succor to worried consumers by pointing out that inflation was overwhelmingly about a handful of weird categories, such as used cars. Well, that’s no longer true. Today used-car prices are actually declining as inflation has moved on to service industries, such as restaurants and tourism. This week, gas prices hit their highest average nominal price ever. Inflation is bad for all sorts of reasons. People really hate it: The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment is near its 60-year low.

4. A lot of people feel poorer than they did one year ago. Unemployment is very low, and the labor market is tight, which means workers can easily quit jobs and take new positions to make more money. (This trend is sometimes confusingly referred to as the “Great Resignation.”) That’s a nice situation. But inflation is rising every month, and raises rarely come more than once a year. That means “real,” or inflation-adjusted, wages are actually declining. Worse, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve, wage growth is starting to level off, even as inflation continues to march on. This isn’t a tenable situation.

5. Savings are falling, and debt is rising. From 2020 to 2021, the U.S. government sent most American households several thousand dollars in checks to get them through the pandemic. With much of the economy shut down, many Americans held on to that stimulus cash, and the personal-savings rate soared to a 60-year record. But now Americans have spent just about all that cash, and the personal-savings rate has fallen to below its 2010s average. During an unstable moment for the economy—with markets collapsing, and inflation rising, and the Federal Reserve slamming the brakes on the economy—the typical household doesn’t have much in the way of protection. Instead consumer debt is breaking new record highs.

6. The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes are already causing mayhem. One of the Federal Reserve’s mandates is to keep inflation around 2 percent. Well, so much for that one. Inflation has skyrocketed past 8 percent, leading the Fed to announce a spree of rate hikes designed to slow down economic activity. In theory, the plan works like this: The Federal Reserve raises interest rates, which makes it more expensive to borrow money for mortgages, cars, and business investments. As a result, investment in all those categories and more declines, and the economy cools off. But here’s the problem. Modern history has very few examples of unemployment this low and inflation this high where rate increases haven’t caused a recession. On the path to crushing inflation, the Fed may destroy trillions of dollars of wealth and economic activity.

7. China is a mess. The world’s second-largest economy has had a strange 2022. China’s zero-COVID policies have led to shocking lockdowns in major cities such as Shanghai, freezing economic activity. China is also dealing with a real-estate-investment implosion, falling business confidence, and startling declines in economic activity. Why is this troubling for the U.S.? Because China was projected to account for about one-quarter of global economic growth in the next few years. When China sneezes—or, more apt, when Chinese officials forcibly quarantine anybody who sneezes—the world could catch a cold. The U.S. might have been in a strong position to deal with a Chinese slowdown if its other trading partners were all doing well. But they’re not.

8. A recession is coming for Europe. The U.K. economy is shrinking, and the central bank says inflation will exceed 10 percent this year. War in Ukraine has sent energy prices skyrocketing throughout Europe, and most economists believe that the continent’s economy will contract this year. Europe seems very likely headed toward both stagnation and inflation—the dreaded combination that, 50 years ago, gave birth to the awful term stagflation. If Europe shrinks while Chinese growth decelerates, American exporters will have a hard time contributing to growing GDP.

9. Oh yeah, it’s still a pandemic. Restaurant activity and airline travel are nearly back to their pre-pandemic highs as most Americans return to something like “normal.” But we don’t know what else the virus and its variants are going to throw at us. Could the next variant be more transmissible and more deadly, and also get around our immunity? I hope not. But these are the 2020s. Anything is possible.

About a year into the pandemic, at an emotional low, I entered the hours I spent caring for my family and our home into the online Invisible Labor Calculator to see how much my work might be worth. It was created by the journalist Amy Westervelt, who used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to assign an hourly wage to different tasks—cleaning, considering the emotional needs of family members, doing yard work, cooking, etc. I was floored when the calculator told me that my annual wage should be more than $300,000, which would make being a domestic worker the highest-paying job I’ve ever had. By far.  

According to Oxfam, if women around the world made minimum wage for all the unpaid hours of care work they performed in 2019, they would have earned $10.8 trillion. In America alone, they would have earned $1.5 trillion, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

[Read: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]

Even care work that is paid is hardly ever paid enough. For many domestic workers, providing quality care means forging intimate, familial relationships and acquiring professional knowledge that is sensual and personal.

This article was adapted from Angela Garbes’s new book Essential Labor

This expertise lives in the bodies of women of color throughout America. Ninety-two percent of domestic workers are women, and 57 percent of them are Black, Hispanic, Asian American, or Pacific Islander. We entrust the safety and cleanliness of our homes to Latin American workers, who make up 62 percent of house cleaners. Whether they maintain our house, care for our elders, or watch our children, there is a wide and long-standing gap between the wages of domestic workers and all other workers in America. Whereas the median wage for workers in this country is nearly $20 an hour, it is barely $12 for domestic workers. The gap is widest for nannies—97 percent of whom are women—who earn a median of just $11.60 an hour. And although the cost of living has steadily risen, domestic workers’ wages have remained mostly stagnant for decades.                                                                   

“White class-privileged women in the United States have historically freed themselves of reproductive labor by purchasing the low-wage services of women of color,” Rhacel Salazar Parreñas writes in her study of Filipina immigration and international reproductive labor.

[Read: How domestic workers enable well-off women to prosper]

How did we get to this place where essential work is so devalued? We are entrusting what we say is most precious—our children, our future—to other people, yet we are not willing to pay them a living wage? This is by design. American capitalism relies on free and cheap domestic labor. Our economic systems cannot be truly equitable and just unless we compensate care work fairly.

Associations of caregiving with women and the domestic sphere and of “real work” with the money and activities outside the home run deep. But they are actually fairly recent concepts, historically speaking. “The division between ‘home’ and ‘workplace’ didn’t exist in feudal Europe [where] women worked as doctors, butchers, teachers, retailers, and smiths,” the labor journalist Sarah Jaffe writes. But the home was excluded from the idea of the “market” under capitalism.

Placing reproductive labor outside of market relations is what upholds the professional world that relies on domestic laborers. If those who do “professional” work had to commensurately pay the care workers who made their jobs possible, less profit would be made. Without care workers, the system falls apart.                

The work of mothering remains out of sight and out of mind to many because it occurs in the home. The scholars Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore call this confinement of women, which began in the 17th century, the “Great Domestication.”

Domestication moved people away from a more communal way of living. Men ventured out and worked for employers, in fields and factories, and earned an individual wage. Women stayed in and oversaw the home, where they kept men fed and comfortable, and gave birth to the next generation of workers. This paved the way for the promotion of the nuclear family as the primary framework for organizing our lives: a single household unit with private property (a wife was property), where the children she raised became the means to protect and pass down wealth. This arrangement cemented the notion that domestic work is women’s work, natural and good, done with no expectation of compensation: a labor of love. That ethos—of each household going it alone—prevails today.

[Read: My husband paid me to do housework]

After the Great Depression, which left so many Americans destitute, the federal government stepped in to help families. The concept of a “family wage,” a guaranteed minimum wage that would be enough to support a working husband, a housewife, and a couple of children, became popular. While New Deal programs came closer to providing a family wage, that grand idea was doomed in predictably American ways: Lawmakers from the South didn’t believe that Black men and women should be entitled to the same wages and opportunities as white people. So the protections excluded two types of laborers: agricultural workers and domestic workers. These jobs were commonly held by Black people.   

Little progress has been made toward fair pay for domestic work. The division between home and work remains paramount. Since the 1960s, women’s participation in the waged workforce has steadily risen. But as Jaffe notes, in the current age, when many women work both outside and inside the home, “we hear a lot about ‘work-life’ balance, but not enough about how, for everyone ‘life’ (code for ‘family’) means ‘unpaid work.’”                                                            

In the 20th century, one of the most notable efforts to improve the lives of care workers and mothers was the welfare-rights movement. Established in 1966, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), led by Black women such as Johnnie Tillmon, organized for expanded access and entitlements for women eligible for welfare, which at the time was called Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). The NWRO used direct action—holding sit-ins and disrupting welfare offices—as well as marches and rallies to lobby for greater benefits and the elimination of punitive policies. Eventually, the NWRO started a campaign to benefit all people in America, not just AFDC mothers and families.

In a 1972 article for Ms. magazine titled “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” Tillmon laid out the organization’s vision for a guaranteed adequate income:

There would be no “categories”—men, women, children, single, married, kids, no kids— just poor people who need aid. You’d get paid according to need and family size only and that would be upped as the cost of living goes up …

In other words, I’d start paying women a living wage for doing the work we are already doing—child-raising and house-keeping. And the welfare crisis would be over, just like that.

The NWRO came very close to winning a guaranteed income. President Richard Nixon put forth a Family Assistance Plan that, as Jaffe writes, “would have given a basic income to more than ten million people.” Ultimately, Nixon’s plan did not pass, and instead America got Ronald Reagan and the racist narrative of the “welfare queen.” But that the NWRO came as close as it did to enacting a guaranteed income for caregivers suggests that this is possible. Though they did not succeed in everything they fought for, the NWRO and its allies did improve conditions for thousands of families, helping them access all the benefits they were legally entitled to. As Tillmon wrote, “Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country.”

When most of us imagine economies, domestic or international, we picture workers toiling in factories or offices, money being wire transferred, stocks and bonds traded: all activities that play out in public, highly visible. But the global economy is also driven by domestic labor—happening in laundry rooms and nurseries, performed on hands and knees, sponge or toilet brush in hand.                    

I’m Pinay, my husband is white, and we have relied on my mother’s unpaid labor, as well as the paid labor of immigrants and Latina, Black, and Chinese women, to care for our children. I continue to navigate my place as an American woman of color who is financially privileged. I’ve been mistaken by strangers for my light-skinned daughters’ caretaker, which has angered me and also forced me to question why it makes me angry. This tension has made me bold, willing to speak out in solidarity with caregivers in some instances. At other times, it’s made me quiet and embarrassed. I can claim otherness, I know it intimately, but I have always understood that, if things fell apart, I could ask for help, that I would never be left destitute or totally alone.

Women who can easily work outside the home are still not free or unburdened from other people. We are dependent on our nannies, cleaners, personal Instacart shoppers, DoorDash delivery drivers, parents, co-parents, and in-laws. The domestic load is as heavy as ever, but those who have means often spread it out among multiple people. This is not real progress.

Care is expected to be cheap the world over, in part because the global economy doesn’t have the ability to properly value care work; conventional economic measures—concepts such as supply, demand, and markets—fall woefully short. But the failures of imagination that have led to this moment don’t have to dictate that care work not be assigned monetary value going forward, or that we shouldn’t try.

We have gotten glimpses of what is possible when women insist on being fully visible and valued.  On October 24, 1975, when women in Iceland staged the Women’s Strike. An estimated 90 percent of women did not show up for work that day—in and outside the home—and it brought Iceland’s economy to its knees. Factories, schools, and nurseries were closed, and men either called in to stay home from work or took their children with them. In the decades that have followed, some of the strike’s agenda has taken hold. In 2018, Iceland became the first country in the world to require employers with more than 25 employees to give women and men equal pay for equal work. Part of the strike’s legacy is showing that organizing on a mass scale is possible, and that such a demonstration of solidarity made lasting impressions.

If we reframe domestic work as essential labor and insist upon its centrality in a global labor movement, we create opportunities for solidarity among caregivers, mothers, and all workers. Unity can exist across gender identities, international borders, and disparate industries, rooted in any work that exploits an invisible labor force. Because caregivers are no different from ride-share drivers, sanitation workers, welders, teachers, physicians, and nurses. Those of us who outsource care work are no different from our nannies and child-care workers and the people cleaning our homes. Our issues are the same as those of the women we have paid to take care of our children—for me, that means I stand with Maria, Josephine, Huang Ping, Belen, Ceci, Mari, Marta, Sandra, and Titi.            

We have been trained to view our houses and apartments as private refuges, but they must also be seen for what they are: sites of work and monetary exchange that are part of the global economy. Redefining the workplace, as so many of us have during the COVID-19 pandemic, is a step toward this vision. Work, we now all know, has never been confined to the office or the field or the factory. It was always happening in the kitchen, garage, and backyard.

The pandemic has been an unprecedented opportunity to see the reality of modern American life: We are all workers, and all of our work is valuable. But it’s not enough to see that; the next step is to actually value it, with fair pay.

This article was adapted from Angela Garbes’s new book Essential Labor.

Missiles deployed there, meant to target Chinese ships sailing in and out the Western Pacific, are the closest such weapons Japan has to China.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton says ship hugged western coastline travelling in Australia's EEZ.

To avoid drawing unwanted attention, Tommy and the four others dressed as if they were heading out for a leisurely day. It was July 2020, and the weather was perfect for some time on the water. The young men acted as though they knew one another well, and were excited to reconnect. But inside, Tommy felt panicked and desperate. He was about to attempt an escape from Hong Kong, where he faced a near-certain jail sentence for his role in the prodemocracy protests there. He feared that he, or one of these strangers, might have been tailed by police to the docks.

In the scenario that kept replaying in his head, officers closed in on the men as they stood next to their boat, a roughly 20-foot rigid speedboat laden with jugs of extra fuel and fishing equipment. Tommy—who asked to be identified by a nickname—didn’t allow himself to relax until the boat sped away from land, the coastline shrinking behind them and the blue sky stretching out in front.

As the boat’s hull slapped against the rolling swells, the life vests the men carried flew overboard, but they didn’t bother to turn back. One leaned over the edge and peeled identifying numbers off the boat’s bow, hoping for an extra layer of anonymity. They took turns driving—the young men had learned their elementary boating skills from watching videos on YouTube and had practiced a handful of times. No matter who was behind the wheel, they kept the engine throttle wide open and scanned the horizon for trouble. The whipping wind and the din of the motors made communication nearly impossible. The sun set. The lights of fishing boats and enormous shipping vessels bobbed up and down.

Tommy lost track of how long they’d been driving the boat—at least 10 hours. When the GPS unit showed the vessel leaving Hong Kong waters, they finally eased off on the throttle. “We knew we were safe,” Tommy later told me. They passed around snacks and water, then introduced themselves to one another, sharing their real names for the first time and explaining their reasons for undertaking such a perilous journey: All were prodemocracy activists looking for safety on the island of Taiwan. Their bid for freedom, however, would soon draw in the United States.

Hours earlier, one of Tommy’s green Vans sneakers had sailed over the side of the boat and into the water. No one had considered stopping to retrieve it. Now, in spontaneous, rowdy celebration of their nearly completed escape, the group peed on the remaining shoe, then kicked it overboard—a memory that Tommy would laugh about later.

Their plan had been fairly simple: If they made it this far, they would turn off their engines, and call a contact in Taiwan who would alert the coast guard to their presence. When the authorities arrived, they would claim they had run out of fuel on a fishing trip and needed to be towed to shore. Only once on land would they divulge their true stories. Tommy gazed upward as they waited for the coast guard to arrive. The light pollution radiating from Hong Kong normally obscured his view of the stars. But here, in the open water, he could see the whole sky.

When the Taiwanese coast guard appeared, the five men waved flashlights to attract attention. Their plan fell apart almost as soon as the authorities reached their boat. The coast guard had extra fuel on hand, and initially offered to simply transfer it over, then send the wayward boat on its way. As the coast guard crew spoke to the young men, however, they grew suspicious. What were the five doing in the area? Why were they carrying so few supplies and traveling in an unmarked boat? “They knew that we weren’t just out fishing,” Tommy told me.

The young men fessed up, telling the sailors their real intentions. They had been among huge crowds of people who since the spring of 2019 had taken to the streets to call for democracy in Hong Kong. Now they feared for their safety as Beijing not only stamped out the protests, but moved to decimate all dissent in the city. The Taiwanese coast guard brought the group ashore where they were questioned by military officials. The next day, they were moved again by ship. Tommy slept on and off. He wasn’t sure where they were heading.

Eventually, he and the others were deposited in rooms that reminded him of the dorms at his university back in Hong Kong. They had no computers and no internet access. Government officials—Tommy isn’t sure who they were—came and went, asking more questions. Eventually, the five men were allowed to watch TV and read articles from Apple Daily, the now-defunct prodemocracy newspaper. As their confinement stretched into months, Tommy, who had been an arts student before he abandoned his studies, sketched to pass the time.

Some of the young men wanted to stay in Taiwan, but others hoped to resettle elsewhere. They were given English lessons by a tutor. The materials, for reasons none of them understood, covered the history and geography of Boston, and how to navigate the city on public transportation. To mark New Year’s Eve, Tommy shaved off his long hair. He wanted a symbolic new start. Two weeks later—about six months after he’d fled Hong Kong—the journey to freedom that started on a small boat would end on a commercial flight that touched down in the United States.

Hong Kong was long a magnet for people seeking opportunity and running from persecution. Residents of mainland China fleeing the violence and political purges of the Cultural Revolution swam toward the city’s lights—Tommy’s grandmother among them. In the late 1970s, thousands packed into ships, many of which were cramped wooden fishing boats, to escape to Hong Kong from Vietnam as that country’s war ended. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, student activists from China snuck into Hong Kong.

Now the fleeing has reversed, as Beijing’s crusade to strip Hong Kong of its defining freedoms has created a wave of exiles. “It is still beautiful,” Kwok Ka-ki, a former prodemocracy lawmaker, told me of the city, “but underneath, everything has changed.” Soon after we spoke, he was arrested, and now faces charges under a draconian national-security law imposed in 2020, an effort to extinguish any form of political opposition wholesale.

At Hong Kong’s airport—even as it is crippled by stringent COVID regulations—crowds gather nightly to board flights abroad, aiming to join the tens of thousands who have already left. Among them are parents worried about the city’s more nationalistic curriculum, activists escaping the ever-shrinking space for dissent, and former prodemocracy legislators who have seen their colleagues locked up.

Over the course of several years living in and covering Hong Kong, I have met countless such exiles. Some want nothing more than anonymity in their new countries, hoping to put the movement behind them. Others remain deeply involved in activism from abroad, setting up organizations and creating online initiatives. They share an acute feeling of isolation and sadness, unmoored from a place they once believed they could help save.

Three in particular are fleeing almost certain jail time after joining in prodemocracy demonstrations and agitation, their stories highlighting the gulf between Hong Kong’s promise and its reality today. They either escaped aboard a tiny boat, ultimately crossing a vast distance, or tested U.S. border policy by illegally slipping into America on land. One later spent months walking from New York to Florida on foot to raise awareness of Hong Kong’s plight. “You think this is crazy?” Tommy said to me when I marveled at the riskiness of his trip. “Imagine how I feel.”

The exiles—all of whom, like Tommy, asked to be identified by nicknames to avoid retribution from Beijing and pro-China groups—are each grappling with their newfound freedom in different ways, at times clashing with other members of the Hong Kong diaspora over how best to help their home city, and wrestling with guilt for those left behind. They have put their fate in the hands of the U.S., a country they still see as a beacon in their fight against China.

Almost as soon as Tommy and his fellow travelers were escorted ashore in Taiwan, officials there began working to resolve the geopolitical dilemma the group had inadvertently set off. Beijing had baselessly accused the U.S. and Taiwan of fomenting the Hong Kong protests, so a public announcement about the five could further inflame tensions. Taiwan—which lives under Beijing’s constant threat of forceful reunification with mainland China—sought American help. The State Department worked with a Hong Kong lobbyist in Washington, D.C., to begin planning the group’s transfer to U.S. soil.

In January 2021, the men boarded a flight from Taipei to New York City. Through all those months in limbo in Taiwan, Tommy had been unable to directly contact his family. He had rehearsed cracking a joke to tell them he was fine, but when he landed in the U.S. and finally spoke to them on the phone, he broke down crying.

Adams Carvalho

On the surface, Tommy and Ray have a lot in common. Both have family members who fled mainland China for the relative safety of Hong Kong (albeit decades apart), and both grew up on tales of Chinese Communist Party abuse. And though the men’s paths did not cross in Hong Kong, they were both active participants in the city’s protest movement. Tommy had been among those who broke into the Legislative Council building; Ray was one of the students who occupied a university campus in a days-long siege.

But the two are also very different. Tommy is a wiry, bespectacled 24-year-old, whereas Ray, 20, is stocky and gregarious, a bit of a smartass. Tommy was riven with fear and uncertainty during the months it took him to plan his escape from Hong Kong; Ray seemed to me to be totally unbothered by the risks he had taken.

Ray fled Hong Kong aboard a plane bound for London in August 2020. After arriving and looking up Britain’s asylum-acceptance rates, he turned his sights to the United States. But the Trump administration had banned flights from Europe as part of efforts to curtail the coronavirus pandemic, so after a few months in Britain, and some scheming with an eccentric Chinese activist and immigration lawyer he connected with on Twitter, he boarded another flight, this one bound for Mexico. He would cross into the U.S. on foot.

Ray first attempted the crossing soon after arriving, in January 2021. He walked for hours after being dropped near a crossing point by a smuggler. It was frigid and windy. To avoid detection, he trekked in complete darkness. But no one stopped him, and eventually he arrived at a gas station in Southern California, where a contact met him. He fell asleep during the car ride north and awoke only when the driver announced, “Welcome to L.A.”

From there, he initiated an asylum claim, which likely would have inched through the bureaucracy were it not for Ray’s own impatience. Holed up in an Airbnb east of Los Angeles, he killed time watching cable news. He was particularly infatuated with debates over immigration. On one show, liberal-leaning politicians claimed the American system was so dysfunctional that migrants detained after attempting to enter the U.S. would likely be granted asylum faster than those who arrived without incident. Hearing this, Ray devised a new plan.

In early February, he headed back to the border, walked into Mexico, and then, after a few days, tried crossing into the U.S. again. This time, he hiked across a stretch of hills outside Mexicali and used a flashlight to catch the attention of a group of border guards. When they got ahold of him, he explained his situation in English, hoping to find a compassionate audience. Instead, the oldest-looking of the three turned him around, menacingly warned him not to try crossing again, and watched as Ray trudged into Mexico. Again.

Undeterred, Ray waited a few days and revised his tactics. He took a new route and this time, after flagging down some border guards, pretended not to understand English, speaking to them in Cantonese, the dominant language of Hong Kong. Carrying only his mobile phone and a few other possessions, he feigned ignorance—and had to stifle a laugh—when one of the agents said, “I caught a ninja!” The border guards finally resorted to using a translation app to pepper him with questions.

Authorities took him to a detention center where he was held for eight days with about 20 other men. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in San Diego where he was soon transferred was far better. After interviews with U.S. officials, he walked out of Otay Mesa Detention Center in mid-April 2021. The asylum process typically takes from six months up to several years, according to the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group. It took Ray just 63 days.

Since the start of the 2019 protests, the U.S. has consistently called for China to preserve Hong Kong’s independent press, judiciary, and rule of law. Time and again, American officials and politicians have criticized Beijing for its crackdown. Congress passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in 2019, which put the city’s special trading privileges with the U.S. under greater scrutiny, and compelled the U.S. to level sanctions against Hong Kong officials responsible for human-rights abuses. If these measures were designed to curtail China’s actions, however, they failed. Beijing has brushed them off as little more than a nuisance.

Stories such as Tommy’s and Ray’s suggest the U.S. is fulfilling its obligation to Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement. The means they took to get to the U.S., though, were drastic and almost impossible to replicate. A truer test of American mettle is the countless others like them who remain in limbo, victims of a broken and deeply politicized American immigration system. These people stood up to Beijing’s authoritarian might and, knowing they would likely lose, fought for their freedoms anyway. Yet U.S. lawmakers from both parties who once cheered them seem to have largely moved on.

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act passed the House of Representatives by a 417–1 vote in November 2019, but the bipartisanship was fleeting. At the time, few were more eager to bash China than Senator Ted Cruz, who flew to Hong Kong at the height of the protests and dressed in all black out of “solidarity” with the demonstrators. The marches were “inspiring,” Cruz said then. About a year after he proclaimed Hong Kong to be the “new Berlin,” however, he showed the limits of his support. In December 2020, he killed a bill that included provisions for temporary protected status for Hong Kongers and expedited certain refugee and asylum applications. It had previously passed in the House.

A few months before Cruz shot down the bill, saying it was a ploy by Democrats who support “open borders” to make “all immigration legal,” a group of Hong Kongers, among them an American citizen, sought protection in the city’s U.S. Consulate but were turned away. One was arrested by the Hong Kong authorities and sentenced to three years and seven months in jail.

Last August, the Biden administration made a small concession, blocking the enforced removal of many Hong Kong residents from the U.S. for a period of 18 months. The White House said in a memo that “offering safe haven for Hong Kong residents who have been deprived of their guaranteed freedoms in Hong Kong furthers United States interests in the region.” Getting in, however, remains a challenge.

Adams Carvalho

Kenny, a 27-year-old former civil engineer, took the same route as Tommy to flee Hong Kong; he was on the same boat. But while Tommy soon decided that he liked New York, Kenny felt restless.

Kenny had stayed fervently involved in the Hong Kong prodemocracy movement when he was resettled, initially in Arlington, Virginia. He joined protests and tried to spread his message on social media. But he wanted to do more, and staying planted in Arlington while trying to sound the alarm seemed ineffective. So he settled on the most American of pastimes, a road trip—but without that most American of possessions, a car. His first walk was a 10-day trek from the White House to New York City. He hoped that by speaking to ordinary Americans, he could raise awareness of the crackdown under way in his home city. A few months later, Kenny set off on an even more ambitious route, from the Pentagon all the way to Miami. In all, he estimated, he would walk more than 1,000 miles.

Kenny documented his movements on Instagram, posting videos and photos of the people he encountered and the places he passed through. He snapped pictures fit for a tourism ad for rural America: rolling cornfields, Amish families standing near their horse-drawn buggies, red-painted barns. He embarked on his walk with his face completely covered by a reflective sunglass shield that looked like it was borrowed from the prop closet on a cyberpunk film set, and a thin flag pole jutting from his backpack adorned with two black banners that read Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times, one in Chinese and another in English.

His unusual appearance attracted attention, not all of it welcoming. In Maryland, someone called the police on him as he knocked on doors looking for bandages. On the eighth day of his walk to Miami, a stranger pulled a gun on him as he tried to hide near the man’s garage during a rainstorm.

As he moved farther south, Kenny found people to be more accommodating, which he’d expected, and more informed about the prodemocracy movement, which he hadn’t. Often, though, he was downbeat, discovering that many Americans had the luxury of not knowing or caring what was happening on the other side of the world.

He felt more optimistic when a worker at a sports bar in Moncure, North Carolina, told him he had followed the news about Hong Kong, and gave Kenny slices of pizza and an orange soda. In Glynn County, in southeastern Georgia, Kenny spent the night with firefighters who let him sleep in the firehouse. In Florida in mid-October, a woman invited him to sleep at her house. He stayed for three days, met her family, and joined them on a trip to a park where he spotted a manatee in the water. He documented the sighting with an Instagram post punctuated by a string of exclamation points. In all, the walk lasted 66 days.

As he navigated America’s roadways, a court case about him in Hong Kong carried on. Kenny had been among a group of demonstrators who, rallying against a government decision to ban face masks at marches, had assaulted a police officer after the officer grabbed a protester. Video of the skirmish, filmed by a passenger on a nearby bus, was picked up by international news outlets. Kenny was arrested but released on bail, which is when he began trying to escape Hong Kong by boat, eventually succeeding on his fifth or sixth try. (Earlier failed efforts cost him a small fortune.)

Days after his outing to the park in Florida, sentences were handed down against two of Kenny’s co-defendants. One was given seven years in jail, the other sent to a rehabilitation center. Kenny told me he had no regrets about fleeing, that he wanted to look forward. “This is why I decided to walk—because I don’t want to think back or live in a constant state of regret,” he said. He later admitted that he did at times feel guilt about leaving, but he tried to bury it, preferring to focus on forward action. “I’m thinking: What can I do on their behalf?” he said. “This is my purpose.”

In some—extremely limited—respects, he has succeeded, telling individual Americans about a fight for freedom half a world away that many of them are unaware of. I spoke with one of the people who met Kenny on his walking tour, Nicholas Kiernan, who said he had initially driven past Kenny in Northern Virginia in late August while on his way to work. Kenny’s peculiar appearance caught Kiernan’s attention. He resembled “a Google mapping device,” Kiernan told me. “He looked wild.” About a half hour later, Kiernan, a land surveyor, was still thinking about the odd character from his morning commute when Kenny stumbled onto Kiernan’s worksite. Intrigued, Kiernan hopped out of his truck to ask Kenny what he was up to.

Kenny showed him photos of the Hong Kong protests, explaining to Kiernan, who knew nothing about what was happening there, about how police had cracked down on demonstrators. “It was thought-provoking stuff,” Kiernan recounted. But perhaps more than anything, Kiernan said he was impressed by Kenny’s courage—sleeping in a tent and carrying a heavy backpack for miles at a time, speaking to total strangers in a foreign language in a new country. “It takes heart to be able to do something like that.”

Additional reporting by Karina Tsui.