FILE – In this March 3, 2015 file photo, federal agents enter an upscale apartment complex where authorities say a birth tourism business charged pregnant women $50,000 for lodging, food and transportation, in Irvine, Calif. On Thursday, Jan. 31, 2019, authorities announced they have charged 20 people in an unprecedented crackdown on businesses that helped hundreds of Chinese women travel to the United States to give birth to American citizen children. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
President Trump has issued an executive order trying to limit or stop the practice of “birth tourism.” Many commentators, politicians and the media tend to conflate birth tourism with “birthright citizenship,” which may be understandable since Trump often rails against both practices in the same breath. But they are not the same.
Under the Fourteenth Amendment, birthright citizenship holds that those born on U.S. soil are, with certain limited exceptions, U.S. citizens whether their parents are in the country legally or not. The U.S. Supreme Court recently reaffirmed this long-held understanding.
Birth tourism, in contrast, is a premeditated effort, often by upper-middle and upper-income foreign women, to game our immigration system by coming to the U.S. through legal channels but for the undisclosed purpose of having a child on U.S. soil. Once the child is born, the women usually return to their home countries with their newly minted U.S. citizens.
There is a whole network of companies, nonprofit organizations and legal advisors who profit from helping these foreign women abuse our immigration system. That’s why Trump’s new executive order deserves three cheers.
The first cheer: The executive order exposes the practice of birth tourism as an abuse of the system. “Birth tourism operators use deceptive advertisements and inducements to entice foreign nationals to travel to the U.S. for the purpose of giving birth on American soil.”
It is not a recent phenomenon. In 2009 a health care newsletter exposed several Arizona-based facilities that sought to attract “well-to-do Mexican mothers.” The centers were “marketing a ‘birth package’ offering cutting edge technology, cozy settings and the chance for mothers to grant their babies American citizenship.”
The story had identified 13 different birth-tourism packages. One package advertised “$2,300 for a vaginal birth with a two-day stay, and $4,600 for a c-section and a four-day stay.” (Those prices may seem low, but that was 18 years ago, and those paying cash for health care often get a much lower price than those using insurance.)
The second cheer: Addressing birth tourism attempts to stop corruption. Trump’s executive order explains that operators “promise citizenship; access to public benefits; and short-term stays in specialized facilities, hotels, or rentals, but often fail to deliver on these promises.”
In 2018, Georgetown Law’s O’Neil Institute wrote, “Women from foreign countries, mainly China and Russia, are paying tens of thousands of dollars to temporarily relocate to the U.S. during their pregnancy in order to give birth in the U.S. and thereby guarantee U.S. citizenship for their child.”
The Guardian newspaper says that during the Obama years, Chinese women were paying $30,000 to $100,000 to buy a birth-tourism package. Leslie Tai, a Chinese American documentary filmmaker, even made a film about the practice, “How to Have an American Baby.”
And it wasn’t just Mexicans or the Chinese. The Center for Immigration Studies says expectant mothers also came from several countries, including Taiwan, Korea, Nigeria, Turkey, Russia and Brazil.
In 2020 the Center for Immigration Studies released a report estimating there were 33,000 births annually to women in the U.S. on temporary visas. A new estimate puts that number at 70,000 in 2023 alone.
Some people dismiss the concerns, claiming birth tourism doesn’t involve that many people. But those selling the packages and facilitating the practice are corrupting the system and many of the people involved.
Ironically, those least concerned seem to be progressives — the same people who are constantly complaining that the rich don’t think the laws apply to them and use their money to get whatever they want. Whether or not that is true in other areas, it is undoubtedly true with birth tourism.
The third cheer: Fixing birth tourism could be a step toward much-needed immigration reform. Voters turned against Democrats in 2024 in part because of President Biden’s disastrous open-border policy. Americans were sick and tired of foreigners abusing our immigration system. That is still happening, though, through birth tourism.
Opponents of comprehensive immigration reform — mostly Republicans and the MAGA crowd — asserted the country needed to fix the border first before discussing immigration reform. Well, Trump boasts that he has fixed the border problem. Monthly apprehensions of illegal crossers are down 86 percent.
If Trump can also address birth tourism, voters and Republican politicians might be willing to start discussing immigration reform that creates a path for foreigners to come and work in the U.S. legally, in both high and low-skilled jobs. That would be a real victory.
Read the original article on TheHill.com