State Department to End Birth Tourism Network
The State Department announced on Wednesday plans to dismantle its birth tourism operations in Africa and Europe.
Each year, around 33,000 children born in the U.S. acquire automatic citizenship because their foreign parents enter the country on temporary visas, often tourist ones, before their birth. Years later, these children can assist their parents in obtaining green cards.
This birth tourism phenomenon is particularly notable among certain groups, including Turkish residents in New York City, Chinese citizens in California, Russians in Florida, and Middle Eastern families in Illinois.
According to recent posts on X, State Department officials reported they have disrupted a complex birth tourism network that employed fake documents and visa facilitators to assist over 100 foreign nationals in securing visas for themselves, as well as U.S. citizenship for their children.
In North Africa, officials indicated they had revoked more than 100 visas for parents seeking to give birth in the U.S. primarily for citizenship purposes.
In Europe, one U.S. embassy uncovered over 400 suspected birth tourism cases since 2024, with investigations highlighting at least six companies advising Europeans on how to obtain temporary U.S. visas without revealing that the main goal is to give birth in the country.
The officials stated, “We shut it down, revoked their visas, and permanently banned several fraudsters from ever traveling to the United States again.”
Peter Schweitzer’s recent work discusses how numerous Chinese-owned maternity travel agencies in California cater specifically to Chinese families seeking to give birth in the U.S.
Additionally, in December 2020, the Department of Justice uncovered a significant birth tourism operation in New York City that resulted in over 100 children receiving birthright American citizenship through foreign parents visiting the country for childbirth.
A similar operation was revealed in 2019 involving several Chinese families in California, which could have led to roughly 8,500 children being granted U.S. citizenship because their foreign parents traveled to the U.S. solely to give birth.
