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According to NBC, it's primarily political refugees. People who aren't feeling safe in China looking for somewhere rich and unwilling to extradite. Though it makes sense to sneak in some sleeper agents too - it's not like it's hard to procure guns or explosives in the US.
You can definitely be persecuted for speaking out, and everyone knows this. It’s also very hard to verify that you’ve been persecuted, so a whole lot of people claim refugee status who haven’t actually been persecuted.
We had a guy join my church for a few weeks, and he reported that he’d also attended Baptist, Mormon, and a whole bunch more. According to my Chinese wife accumulating a big list of churches you’ve attended is a strategy for claiming religious refugee status.
You can just list off different churches you've attended and pattern-match to somebody else's semi-recent claim of repression?
It didn’t make much sense to me. My best guess is trying to accumulate people that can confirm that you attended church services.
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IIRC religious refugees are resettled with their coreligionists by preference.
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