Immigration has been the twenty-first century's Rorschach test for the Chinese government. This test, in which a person describes patterns, perceived objects or shapes in an inkblot, is designed to examine one's personality and emotional functioning. Similarly, the Chinese government was looking at the patterns of foreigners’ immigration at the beginning of this century trying to grasp its meaning for the economy, community- and nation-building. The big question has become: how open should a society be towards immigrants and how open or secure should borders be? Beijing's response to an increasing global migration – like that of many other states – was fundamentally shaped by the ‘global war on terror’ and its ensuing violent conflicts, in turn catalysing debates about how borders and immigration should be governed in light of an increasing ‘risk’ associated with opening borders. Over the last two decades, many governments have struggled to reconcile the need to maintain open borders that facilitate ‘talent’ immigration while simultaneously upholding secure borders that prohibit irregular immigration; they have thus grappled with defining rules to select and legitimize certain groups of immigrants over others. Emergency measures following the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 showed how fragile the existing systems were: closing down borders was in many countries the first measure taken to prevent the virus from spreading, resulting in months of negotiating the risks of re-opening borders for specific groups of immigrants and travellers. As such, immigration has evolved into a meta-issue of twenty-first-century politics.