OPINION:
You would not know it to listen to the constant America-bashing of the political left, but the United States is a fantastic place to be born and to live.
Thanks to the policies of recent Democratic administrations, it is also a relatively easy country to infiltrate for potentially nefarious purposes.
Birth tourism — the practice of pregnant foreign women coming to the U.S. to give birth and claim citizenship for their newborns — is a flourishing cottage industry, particularly among Chinese nationals.
It gained steam, according to the Trump administration, in the years after a 2009 parole program by President Obama that allowed Chinese citizens to visit the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, without tourist visas.
“The birth tourism industry is rampant there, with more annual births to Chinese visitors than native residents,” according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
It is also happening in the continental U.S. Around 2013, Beijing began sending “Chinese elites” to the U.S. to give birth and take advantage of birthright citizenship, according to author Peter Schweizer. He told Fox News in January that about 100,000 Chinese children gain U.S. citizenship this way every year — potentially 1 million or more since 2013.
“Our federal government has no idea how many Chinese nationalists have done this because we do not collect data [on parents’ nationality] on birth certificates.”
He is right. No agency tracks non-American women coming to the U.S. to give birth, making an accurate estimate of the frequency difficult to obtain.
CIS puts the number at 20,000 to 26,000 a year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 2024, about 9,500 births occurred to parents with non-U.S. residential addresses. Even left-leaning sources acknowledge that this number is probably an undercount.
The Democrats and their always supportive mainstream media say there is little cause for concern. However, birth tourism in the U.S. is a dilemma, and not just because of the cost to American taxpayers — estimated at $2.4 billion annually in welfare and medical expenditures, according to CIS.
“A U.S. passport is an extremely useful and coveted document for terrorists, spies and criminals, giving them ready access to virtually any country on Earth where they may elect to set up operations,” CIS reports. “Such groups have recruited U.S. passport holders raised abroad.”
In California, after an undercover operation that began in 2015, federal agents in 2019 charged operators of apartment complexes being used as “maternity hotels” for pregnant Chinese women who had paid up to $100,000 to scheme operators for fraudulent visas so they could have their babies in the U.S., NBC News reported.
More than 500 companies in China specialize in birth tourism schemes, Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court in April. Of course, “birth tourists” also come from other countries. As the political left likes to say, it is not a crime to be from another country and give birth in America.
Still, immigration fraud is a crime, and most uncovered cases of birth tourism have been found to involve it, according to the Department of Justice.
On June 30, the same day the high court struck down Mr. Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship, the Justice Department issued a memo vowing “to zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship by investigating and prosecuting” immigration fraud.
The memo details the USA Happy Baby Inc. case, in which a Chinese husband and wife in California charged Chinese nationals up to $100,000 each for aid getting to the U.S. to give birth, including help obtaining fake visas.
Fox News co-host Kayleigh McEnany said in April that Chinese birth tourism could result in “up to ONE MILLION people that could be voting in this country by 2030.” “Imagine that: Communist Party voters.”
You know who can imagine that (and is probably gleeful at the thought)? Members of the far left.
They do not seem to care that the “tourists” who get public assistance to cover the costs of giving birth in the U.S. need not pay back that money to obtain tourist visas.
They do not seem bothered by the fact that, once the children are 21, their parents can legally come live in the U.S., unencumbered by the admissions ceilings that apply to most other migration.
Nor, apparently, do they care about the security threat that many of these people could pose.
The Supreme Court’s wrongheaded birthright citizenship ruling is likely to expand the number and popularity of birth tourism scams. The administration is right to take action, and we await word on next steps in its crackdown on behalf of the American people.
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