Abstract A sizable portion of the undocumented population in the US is Chinese but they are an understudied group. We analyze secondary literature and policies to understand undocumented Chinese immigration in its historical and contemporary contexts and draw on interviews with undocumented migrants, community organizers, social workers, and others working in the Chinese community in New York City, as well as participant observation of community events, to analyze how illegality is constructed and experienced by undocumented Chinese migrants. We show how restrictive immigration policies exclude most Chinese migrants from legal entry into the US, force many to endure dangerous migration routes and bind Chinese migrants’ experience of illegality with asylum seeking. The asylum regime is putatively humanitarian but inflicts legal violence and diverts efforts away from collective organizing for rights-based remedies towards debt-fueled migration and asylum seeking, a process that keeps migrants in lengthy periods of legal precarity and reproduces national and global inequalities. Our study contributes to the literature on migrant illegality in sociology that is primarily based on the experiences of Latinx migrants by highlighting the continuities and unique features of legal violence experienced by undocumented Chinese.