The Myth of Chinese Birth Tourism

The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump exaggerates claims of Chinese birth tourism, Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes two military officers, and China tests a long-range missile.

Refuting Trump’s Birth Tourism Claims

The U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the Trump administration’s bid to overturn birthright citizenship has revived a familiar strain of racist fearmongering: U.S. President Donald Trump and other Republicans have suggested that so-called birth tourism from China is a government-backed scheme to plant foreign agents on U.S. soil.

Though birth tourism—in which a foreign-born mother travels to the United States to give birth to a child who does not remain as a U.S. resident—is technically illegal, it is a real industry. But it is nowhere near as large as critics make it out to be.

There is no official data on birth tourism, but at its peak in 2015, it is estimated to have represented less than 0.3 percent of all U.S. births. In recent years, some 7,000 to 9,000 instances of birth tourism occurred annually in the United States, the overwhelming majority of which were children born to Hispanic mothers, mostly from Mexico.

Of these, births to nonresident Chinese mothers in the United States are estimated in the low hundreds each year. Another small group consists of Chinese women on longer-term temporary visas, primarily students, who spend years in the United States. Around 27,000 children per year are born to mothers who were themselves born in China, but most of those mothers are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

The number of births to undocumented immigrants is higher than the birth tourism rate—about 9 percent of U.S. births in 2023—but also overwhelmingly represented by Hispanic mothers. Most undocumented Chinese immigrants are doing everything possible to avoid returning to China, and many have spouses or partners who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.

Arranging to give birth in the United States as a nonresident is extremely difficult. Most airlines refuse to carry women in the final weeks of pregnancy, and U.S. visa officers routinely deny entry to visibly pregnant applicants unless there is a genuine medical need. Giving birth in the United States therefore generally requires obtaining a long-stay B-2 visa before the pregnancy is obvious.

There was once a loophole: Visa-free travel to the Northern Mariana Islands allowed wealthy Chinese citizens relatively easy access to U.S. territory. There was a spike in foreign births there in 2018, with 574 foreign nationals—apparently almost all from mainland China—giving birth on the territory. That loophole was largely closed by reducing the visa-free stay from 45 days to 14 and introducing additional vetting, causing foreign births to plummet.

As a result, birth tourism to the United States is restricted almost exclusively to the wealthy, who can afford the considerable expense and uncertainty. It is also sometimes linked to surrogacy, which is illegal in China. Chinese agencies can charge anywhere from $36,000 to $100,000 for birth tourism “vacation packages” to the United States.

But the idea that this birth tourism industry is a Chinese government plot is ridiculous—especially because Beijing explicitly opposes it. After all, for many wealthy Chinese families, U.S. citizenship represents an insurance policy against a government that can arbitrarily imprison them or destroy their businesses overnight.

These superrich elites spend enormous effort trying to move assets overseas despite strict capital controls and often seek foreign residency or visas in case they need to leave China permanently. Securing U.S. citizenship for a child provides, at minimum, a guaranteed refuge for the next generation.

One particularly absurd idea is that China will use children born in the United States to infiltrate the U.S. government. That reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the U.S. security clearance process, under which even second-generation Chinese Americans with family remaining in China are regarded with suspicion. Someone raised in China with few genuine ties to the United States would have no realistic chance of receiving one.

The Republican panic over Chinese birth tourism reflects how legitimate concerns about Chinese espionage and Beijing’s growing influence can tip into racism. Chinese Americans often have the language skills and cultural knowledge that the U.S. government needs to understand China. They are potential assets, not liabilities. More importantly, they are Americans entitled to the same rights and equal treatment as every other citizen.

What We’re Following

The Chinese military leadership has been depleted by successive political purges, as I’ve written about before. Zhang, a political commissar whose career has been spent in so-called discipline inspection, seems to have been put in place to continue Xi’s purges and to manage the gradual installation of a cohort of leaders before a new Central Military Commission is announced next year.

Long-range missile launch. On Monday, China conducted a long-range missile test in the Pacific, causing alarm among nearby island nations. The prime minister of the Solomon Islands condemned the test, saying it was “not something a friend does.” Beijing provided limited advanced notice of the test.

The launch appears intended primarily to demonstrate China’s second-strike nuclear capabilities to the United States. Like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, China is building a nuclear deterrent centered on the ability of its submarine fleet to survive an initial strike and retaliate against the continental United States.

FP’s Most Read This Week

Tech and Business

AI propaganda. A Nieman Lab investigation into an unusually sophisticated fake news operation has uncovered an intriguing Chinese connection. The website, theeditorial.news, presented itself as an in-depth magazine called the Editorial, and at least one of its stories—claiming that independent media in Alabama had effectively died—spread widely online.

But the site, which has since been taken offline, appeared entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Many of its stories criticized the U.S.-Taiwan relationship or backed China’s claims in the South China Sea. The operation appears to have used unrelated stories to provide cover for what was ultimately a propaganda effort.

Ironically, the popularity of the article about Alabama ended up exposing the site.

Compute strain. China’s surge in AI adoption is placing enormous strain on compute resources, with at least one firm raising its prices for cloud services and other processing power elements by more than 430 percent.

Customers’ AI demands are becoming increasingly complex, with the average query now demanding five times as many tokens—the units of data that generative AI models use to understand inputs and process outputs—as it did a year ago.

That makes China’s AI price wars even more consequential. Companies continue to lose money, but venture capital keeps pouring into the sector in the belief that the eventual winners will dominate an industry worth trillions of dollars.