Q: How real is birth tourism?
A: The government doesn’t provide estimates of the extent of so-called birth tourism — pregnant women coming to the U.S. on tourism visas in order to obtain birthright U.S. citizenship for their newborn child. One outside group has estimated it may be more than 20,000 births per year. Some argue it’s not common enough to justify upending longstanding birthright citizenship policies.
FULL ANSWER
As the reader who asked us about this noted, birth tourism was cited by the solicitor general in Supreme Court arguments on April 1 as a reason why birthright citizenship ought to be ended. According to longstanding interpretation, the U.S. Constitution grants citizenship to children born in the U.S. even if their parents are in the country illegally. The Trump administration is challenging that.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court that birthright citizenship “has spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States.”
When asked by Chief Justice John Roberts if he had any information about how common or significant a problem birth tourism is, Sauer responded, “No one knows for sure.”
The high court is expected to rule this summer on the case challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, which he issued on the first day of his second term.
The State Department does not keep data on birth tourism. But that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from sharing high-end estimates.
Trump has long criticized birth tourism, saying it is a magnet for illegal immigration. In 2023, he proposed an executive order that he said would “end their unfair practice known as birth tourism where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for their last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child, often to later exploit chain migration to jump the line and get green cards for themselves and their family members.” (What he signed in 2025, however, went beyond targeting birth tourism and called for an end to birthright citizenship for any child born in the U.S. to parents who aren’t citizens or legal permanent residents.)
On Fox News on April 4, Border Czar Tom Homan said, “Birth tourism has been a problem for the three decades that I’ve been enforcing immigration law, especially from Russia and China, where hundreds of thousands of their nationals come to this country just to give birth. So we’ve got hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals and Russian nationals who have U.S. citizen children. And if that continues, that is a significant national security threat.”
In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates low immigration, estimated the possible number of birth tourism cases at 20,000 to 26,000 per year. For context, there were 3.61 million births in the U.S. that year.
Steven Camarota, director of research for CIS, said he arrived at the estimate by comparing census data with birth records. Due to some changes in the census data, he said, the 2020 estimate is the most recent he can provide. But over a decade, he said, that would be an estimate of more than 200,000 birth tourism cases.
Birth Tourism Operations
In his Supreme Court arguments, Sauer cited a 2022 congressional report from Republicans on the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that detailed two birth tourism operations: one that solicited clients in China and operated out of California and another that catered to “Russian elites coming to Miami through these birth tourism companies.”
Sauer also noted that in 2015, a Chinese newspaper reported that at least 500 companies offered “birth tourism” services in China at that time.
In 2019, federal authorities announced the first federal case involving birth tourism, with the arrest of three people for running an operation in Southern California catering to Chinese clients. The indictments, which came following an undercover operation in 2015, also included an additional 16 fugitive defendants.
“The indictments describe birth tourism schemes in which foreign nationals, mostly from China, applied for visitor visas to come to the United States and lied about the length of their trips, where they would stay, and the purposes of their trips – which were to come to the U.S. for three months to give birth so their children would receive U.S. birthright citizenship,” according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release at the time.
The press release said the operators coached pregnant Chinese customers about “how to pass the U.S. Consulate interview in China by falsely stating that they were going to stay in the U.S. for only two weeks. Their clients were also coached to trick U.S. Customs at ports of entry by wearing loose clothing that would conceal their pregnancies. … The indictments allege that many of the Chinese birth tourism customers failed to pay all of the medical costs associated with their hospital births, and the debts were referred to collection.”
“Receiving a tourist visa from the United States Government is a privilege, not a right,” IRS Criminal Investigation Acting Special Agent in Charge Bryant Jackson stated at the time.
One of the operations in the indictment purported to have a “100-person team” in China and to have served more than 500 Chinese birth tourism customers. The operation used an array of apartments in California and charged customers between $40,000 to $80,000. Another, which was believed to be the largest birth tourism operation, claimed it “provided services to 8,000 pregnant women (4,000 from China) since we established.”
In an interview on Fox News in January, Peter Schweizer, author of the book “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” said China had “created an industrial model to exploit birthright citizenship.”
“Our federal government has no idea how many Chinese nationals have done this,” Schweizer said, because the U.S. does not compile birth certificate data on the nationality of parents. “So our federal government has no clue.”
Schweizer claimed Chinese officials estimated as many as 100,000 Chinese babies have been born each year in the U.S. over the last 13 years.
Republican legislators have also raised concerns about the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a 14-island U.S. territory in the Western Pacific, being used as a birth tourism hub. Since it’s a U.S. territory, those born in the Northern Mariana Islands are granted citizenship.
In a Jan. 15 letter to the departments of Homeland Security and the Interior, Sens. Rick Scott, Jim Banks and Markwayne Mullin argued that President Barack Obama had paved the way for birth tourism with a parole program in 2009 that enabled Chinese nationals to visit the Northern Mariana Islands without a tourist visa.
“Birth tourism has long been an underground industry in the CNMI, with pregnant Chinese women flocking to Saipan to give birth that automatically provides U.S. citizenship to their new-born child,” the Pacific Island Times reported on Dec. 5, 2017. “Most of these women leave the CNMI after childbirth and receipt of their baby’s U.S. passport.”
Births registered to foreign tourists in the Northern Mariana Islands reached a peak of 581 in 2018, the New York Times reported.
That year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands reported the conviction of a man for operating an illegal birth tourism business on Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. A press release said the man — who was sentenced to a year in jail — said he had employed “dozens of caretakers, or ‘nannies’, all Chinese nationals who were in the CNMI without work authorization.”
Kimberlyn King-Hinds, a Republican who serves as a non-voting delegate for CNMI in the U.S. House of Representatives, told NPR that local and federal officials have since cracked down on the practice and tightened border security. By 2025, she said, births to foreign tourists had dropped to 47. (That figure was also confirmed by the New York Times.)
Federal Policies
In 2020, the Trump administration issued a new rule giving the State Department discretion to deny tourism visas to an applicant it has “reason to believe intends to travel for this primary purpose [birth tourism].”
According to the 2022 minority report from the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the “rule change made it more difficult for birth tourism companies to continue operations.”
Camarota said the rule change may have encouraged federal authorities to be more diligent in scrutinizing people seeking tourism visas. But he believes there is more the government could do — such as barring travel visas to people who appear to be obviously pregnant.
“Birth tourism is an issue, there is no doubt,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications and public affairs at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “It is visa fraud and a misuse of the U.S. immigration system.”
According to U.S. law, when people come to the U.S. on tourism visas for pleasure, that “does not include obtaining a visa for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States.”
“That said, birth tourism is a very small occurrence – of the 3.6 million U.S. births annually, a tiny fraction is due to foreign women who are not regularly domiciled in the U.S. coming here for the purpose of giving birth to secure U.S. citizenship for their child,” Mittelstadt said.
In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 9,576 births in the U.S. to foreign residents. Mittelstadt acknowledges that the CDC figures may be an undercount of birth tourism, and that many women may list a U.S. address even if they are not intending to live in the U.S. after giving birth.
“Still, even the most expansive estimates of birth tourism … [from CIS] puts the total at a max 26,000 births a year,” Mittelstadt said.
“There are effective ways to address birth tourism without watering down constitutional protections and both expanding the size of the unauthorized population and creating a category of second-class individuals as would occur if birthright citizenship is ended,” Mittelstadt said.
For example, Mittelstadt said, the government could tighten consular and border screenings, including “rigorous questioning about purpose of travel and financial arrangements for medical care. And making travel primarily for giving birth in the U.S. an explicit ground for inadmissibility or visitor visa denial.” In addition, she said, questions could be added to visa application forms “about pregnancy and intent to deliver in the U.S., with long-term or lifetime visa bans for those who engage in misrepresentations.” Regulations could also be put in place stipulating how late in pregnancy women can travel from international destinations to the U.S. And law enforcement could also prosecute birth tourism operators more vigorously.
Camarota agreed there are ways the U.S. could reduce birth tourism short of banning birthright citizenship.
“You probably can address a lot of it just by taking a forceful position,” Camarota said. “You couldn’t eliminate it, but … you probably could greatly curtail it with different State Department rules and different border controls.”
Camarota said he also wishes the administration had started with an executive order more narrowly targeting birth tourism, which he thinks might be more winnable at the Supreme Court.
“Birth tourism probably is the best case against automatic birthright citizenship,” Camarota said. “Most Americans, say, ‘Yeah, that doesn’t seem right at all.’ And I think that that’s probably where they should start.”
At the Supreme Court hearing on April 1 to consider abolishing birthright citizenship altogether, Chief Justice Roberts asked Sauer, the solicitor general, if he agreed that birth tourism “has no impact on the legal analysis before us.”
Sauer responded that birth tourism is an example that the 14th Amendment’s “interpretation has these implications that could not possibly have been approved by the 19th century framers of this amendment.”
Sauer noted that we now live in a world “where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”
“Well, it’s a new world,” Roberts said. “It’s the same Constitution.”
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