Thread: 'Birth Tourism' a Tiny Portion of Immigrant Babies

Sep 3, 12:16 PM EDT

'Birth tourism' a tiny portion of immigrant babies

By BOB CHRISTIE and PAUL J. WEBER
Associated Press Writers

AP Photo/Eric Gay

SAN JUAN, Texas (AP) -- When Ruth Garcia's twins are born in two months, they'll have all the rights of U.S. citizens. They and their six brothers and sisters will be able to vote, apply for federal student loans and even run for president.

Garcia is an illegal immigrant who crossed into the country about 14 years ago, before her children were born, and the citizenship granted to her children and millions others like them is at the center of a divisive national debate.

Republicans are pushing for congressional hearings to consider changing the nation's 14th Amendment to deny such children the automatic citizenship the Constitution guarantees. They say women like Garcia are taking advantage of a constitutional amendment meant to guarantee the rights of freed slaves, and paint a picture of pregnant women rushing across the border to give birth. A recent Pew Hispanic Center study shows 8 percent of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. in 2008 had at least one illegal parent.

A closer examination of the issue shows that the trend is not as dramatic as some immigration opponents have claimed.

Most children of illegal immigrants are born to parents like Garcia who have made the United States their home for years.

Out of 340,000 babies born to illegal immigrants in the United States in 2008, 85 percent of the parents had been in the country for more than a year, and more than half for at least five years, Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer for Pew, told The Associated Press.

And immigration experts say it's extraordinarily rare for immigrants to come to the U.S. just so they can have babies and get citizenship. In most cases, they come to the U.S. for economic reasons and better hospitals, and end up staying and raising families.

Garcia's husband has been deported and she earns a living selling tamales to other immigrants who live in fear of being deported from the slapdash, impoverished colonias that dot the Texas-Mexico border.

"I think that children aren't at fault for having been born here," Garcia said. "My children always have lived here. They've never gone to another country."

Under current immigration law, Garcia and others like her don't get U.S. citizenship even though their children are Americans.

With an estimated 11.1 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, the issue strikes a chord with many voters - people like retired Air Force nurse and pediatric nurse practitioner Susan Struck, 66, of Double Adobe, Ariz.

"People come over ... and they have babies with U.S. birth certificates, then they go back over the border with that Social Security number, with that birth certificate," and have access to public services, she said at a recent event near the border organized by conservative tea party activists.

Several prominent Republican leaders share Struck's beliefs on the issue. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has been a vocal advocate for changing the Constitution, and he helped the issue gain momentum heading into the midterm elections.

"Women have traveled from across the world for the purpose of adding a U.S. passport holder to their family, as far away as China, Turkey and as close as Mexico," said Jon Feere, legal analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for strict immigration laws.

Still, changing the Constitution is highly unlikely, legal scholars say. Measures have been introduced in each two-year congressional session since 2005, but none has made it out of committee. Constitutional changes require approval by two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress, an impossibility now because Democrats have the majority in both houses and most oppose such a measure. Even if Republicans gain power in November and legislation is passed, an amendment would still need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

To be sure, some pregnant Mexican women do come to the United States. In border cities like Nogales, women have been coming to the U.S. for decades to give birth, although the primary reason is better medical care, Santa Cruz County sheriff Tony Estrada said. Billboards advertising birthing services in Arizona line streets across the border in Nogales, Mexico.

Tucson Medical Center, 115 miles southeast of Phoenix, offers packages designed to provide inclusive care to new mothers. The program draws some residents of the northern Mexican state of Sonora who can afford its upfront costs and already have U.S. visas, spokesman Michael Letson said.

Princeton University demographer Douglas Massey said in 30 years studying Mexican immigration, he's never interviewed a migrant who said they came to the United States just to get citizenship for their children.

"Mexicans do not come to have babies in the United States," said Massey, who blames the tightening of the border in the 1990s for cutting off normal migration of men who used to come to work for a year or two and then go home. "They end up having babies in the United States because men can no longer circulate freely back and forth from homes in Mexico to jobs in the United States and husbands and wives quite understandably want to be together."

More common, he and other experts says, are families stuck with one child who is legal and others who aren't - like Beatriz Gomez, a 35-year-old illegal immigrant who came to Phoenix 11 years ago on a now-expired tourist visa from Arriaga in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Her 12-year-old daughter was born in Mexico and is here illegally, but her two youngest children, ages 8 and 5, were born in the U.S. and are citizens.

"It's sad," Gomez said of her oldest daughter, who was only 1 when the family came to the United States. "She studies hard, and she won't be able to go to a university like the other two."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/ ... SECTION=US

Christie reported from El Mirage, Ariz. Associated Press Writers Amanda Lee Myers in Phoenix and Jonathan J. Cooper in Hereford, Ariz., contributed to this report.

so six and two on the way, thats EIGHT.
do these people know when enough is enough?
or are they that smart that they know american taxpayers will be footing the bill for these brat kids

Why do we keep hearing about illegal immigrant children who are "studying hard' or who want to go to college and become doctors? I am in education, and trust me, 50% of hispanic students drop out of high school. Few go to college. I keep hearing stories that give the impression that MOST of these students are college bound and have high intelligence and talent. Why don't they interview the 50% who are dropping out and relying on welfare and gangs? The ones these writers describe are not typical. They do not represent the typical hispanic student in our California schools, believe me.

More Foreign Mothers Live Abroad to Give Birth on U.S. Soil, Debate Over 14th Amendment
By DEVIN DWYER
April 14, 2010—


Millions of foreign tourists visit the United States every year, and a growing number return home with a brand new U.S. citizen in tow.

Thousands of legal immigrants, who do not permanently reside in the United States but give birth here, have given their children the gift of citizenship, which the U.S. grants to anyone born on its soil.

The number of U.S. births to non-resident mothers rose 53 percent between 2000 and 2006, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Total births rose 5 percent in the same period.

Among the foreigners who have given birth here, including international travelers passing through and foreign students studying at U.S. universities, are "birth tourists," women who travel to the United States with the explicit purpose of obtaining citizenship for their child.

Catering to the women is a nascent industry of travel agencies and hotel chains seeking to profit from the business.

The Marmara Manhattan, a Turkish-owned luxury hotel on New York's City Upper East Side, markets birth tourism packages to expectant mothers abroad, luring more than a dozen pregnant guests and their families to the United States to give birth last year alone.

"What we offer is simply a one-bedroom suite accommodation for $7,750, plus taxes, for a month, with airport transfer, baby cradle and a gift set for the mother," Marmara Hotel spokeswoman Alexandra Ballantine said.

The hotel estimates the total cost of the package at $45,000.

Most women stay for two months, Ballantine said, and they make medical arrangements on their own. "Guests arrange and pay for these by themselves," she said of hospital costs that can approach $30,000.

For those with the means to pay, it's a small price to give a child the full benefits of U.S. citizenship, including the ability to travel freely to and from the United States, easy access to a U.S. education and a chance to start a life here.

"We found a company on the Internet and decided to go to Austin [Texas] for our child's birth," Turkish mother Selin Burcuoglu told Istanbul's Hurriyet Daily News. "I don't want [my daughter] to deal with visa issues. American citizenship has so many advantages."

The greatest of those advantages may be the ability of the citizen child to later sponsor the legal immigration of his or her entire family permanently to this country, experts say.

The "birth tourism" industry, which is difficult to track and remains largely anecdotal, has been on the rise for years, according to government and participants reports.


'Birth Tourism' on the Rise?
Of the 4,273,225 live births in the United States in 2006, the most recent data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics, 7,670 were children born to mothers who said they do not live here.

Many, but not all, of those mothers could be "birth tourists," experts say, although it is difficult to know for sure. The government does not track the reasons non-resident mothers are in the United States at the time of the birth or their citizenship, meaning births to illegal immigrants who live in the United States are counted in the overall total.

In recent years, many women have come from Mexico, South Korea, China and Taiwan, but the trend now extends to countries in Eastern Europe, such as Turkey, where as many as 12,000 children were born in the United States to Turkish parents since 2003 by one estimate.

The business of birth tourism is perfectly legal as long as immigrants are able to pay their own way.

The State Department and Department of Homeland Security have no specific regulations banning pregnant foreigners from entering the United States. But officials say they can and do turn away pregnant women with obvious designs on coming to the United States to take advantage of free medical care.

"When determining if an individual will be allowed to enter the U.S., Customs and Border Protection officers take into consideration the date the child is due for delivery and the length of time the individual intends to stay in the U.S.," a Department of Homeland Security spokesman said.

Still, critics say the practice largely goes unchecked and exploits the true meaning of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted after the Civil War to grant citizenship to descendants of slaves.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside," the amendment reads.

"It's really an incorrect interpretation of the 14th Amendment," said Jerome Corsi, a conservative author and columnist who has studied the issue of birth tourism. "Birthright citizenship is a loophole & [and] as it expands into a business for entrepreneurs in foreign countries who offer birth tourism packages, it markets the loophole to attract additional mothers to the U.S."

Lino Graglia of the University of Texas law school wrote in the Jan. 11 Texas Review of Law & Politics that the authors of the 14th Amendment never would have imagined their words bestowing citizenship to illegal or visiting immigrants.

"It is difficult to imagine a more irrational and self-defeating legal system than one which makes unauthorized entry into this country a criminal offense and simultaneously provides perhaps the greatest possible inducement to illegal entry," Graglia wrote of birthright citizenship.


Closing the 'Birth Tourism' Loophole
The Supreme Court has only addressed the issue once, ruling in 1898 that citizenship applies to U.S.-born children of legal immigrants who have yet to become citizens.

Some legislators, including U.S. Rep. Gary Miller, R-Calif., have called for revising the Constitution to forbid citizenship by birth alone and thereby end the attraction of birth tourists. But other politicos, from both sides of the aisle, say such an approach is politically unrealistic, not to mention unnecessary.

"You just turn people down for being pregnant," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. "That should be the default position and then there'd have to be some very good reason for an exception."

Krikorian acknowledged that some people might find a ban on pregnant visitors "outrageous," but questions the rationality of the alternative.

"Do you really think that's right that somebody here visiting Disneyland should have their children be U.S. citizens, which they'll then inevitably use to get access to the U.S.?" he asked.

Krikorian and others call the offspring of birth tourists "anchor babies," because they can serve as a foothold for future legal immigration of an entire family.

Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, said he sees the debate about birth tourists in a different light, however, noting that arguments about citizenship of children ignore a fundamental question of humanity.

"If we're a country that cares about families and family values, then why are we blaming the children for a decision the parents made. Their only decision was to take a first breath," he said.

"What is the State Department going to do? To fill out a visa application have a woman pee on a stick?"

The United States is one of the few remaining countries to grant citizenship to all children born on its soil. The United Kingdom, Ireland, India and Australia, among others, have since revised their birthright laws, no longer allowing every child born on their soil to get citizenship.

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