Helen Raleigh writes for the Federalist about the impact of President Donald Trump’s opposition to birth tourism.
Recent news from China shows that some Chinese women who plan to give birth in the United States solely to secure citizenship for their children are thinking twice after the Trump administration’s crackdown on “birth tourism.”
In early August, President Trump signed an executive order called “Ending Birth Tourism.” The order defines “birth tourism” as either a foreign national entering the United States on a nonimmigrant visa to give birth or any attempt by a foreign national to help someone else enter the country for the same reason.
It is difficult to know exactly how many babies are born in the U.S. because of birth tourism, since the government does not keep official records and private estimates differ. In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimated there were between 20,000 and 26,000 birth tourism cases.
No official ranking of nationalities for birth tourism exists, but the media often mention Russia, China, Turkey, and Nigeria as common countries of origin. China is cited most often in prominent cases and commercial networks, especially in Southern California, where some packages cost tens of thousands of dollars.
No matter the number of cases or the country of origin, birth tourism has become a profit-driven industry rife with fraud. It has diminished the value of U.S. citizenship by treating it like a “commodity” and thereby breaking “a sacred bond between the American people and the Nation in which they live,” as the executive order states.
The executive order does not create new legislation; it enforces the existing immigration rule that “travel to the United States with the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States is an impermissible basis for the issuance of a B nonimmigrant visa.”
