Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., is introducing legislation to end commercial birth tourism in the United States, a move that could cut off a pipeline that foreign nationals use to gain citizenship for their children.
After President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birth tourism was struck down by the Supreme Court, Scott is taking a different approach.
The Birth Tourism Elimination Act seeks to prohibit foreign nationals from using temporary travel visas to give birth inside the country for the purpose of obtaining citizenship for their children. It will also target companies that assist and charge foreign nationals seeking help facilitating their travel.
“American citizenship is not for sale, and foreign nationals have no right to buy citizenship for their children,” Scott said in a statement provided to the Daily Signal.
“The birth tourism industry has disrespected what it means to be an American by selling and profiting from the freedoms and values that men and women across our country died for,” he continued. “We are blessed to live in the greatest nation on God’s green Earth, and my bill makes it clear that our temporary travel programs cannot be exploited for the purpose of obtaining American citizenship.”
Following the Supreme Court’s July ruling against Trump’s executive order restricting automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to foreign nationals, Scott announced he would introduce legislation to “end the ‘birth tourism’ industry once and for all.”
The Supreme Court ruled that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are granted citizenship and are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at birth. Instead of challenging who qualifies for birthright citizenship, Scott’s new legislation codifies the State Department’s 2020 restriction on using B visas for birth tourism and targets the commercial operations that facilitate it.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, roughly 25,000 children are born in the United States each year to foreign nationals and receive U.S. citizenship at birth.
You Win USA Vacation Services Corp. is just one example of a company that assists foreign families, primarily Chinese citizens, charging them tens of thousands of dollars to organize their travel and birth in the United States. According to the Department of Justice, in 2019 the organization was charged with assisting more than 500 Chinese births and collecting $3 million in international wire transfers from China over two years.
Border Czar Tom Homan agrees this is not a new problem, calling it a “national security threat.”
“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,” Homan said on Fox News ahead of the July Supreme Court hearing.
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
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[ H/T WorldNetDaily ]
