Stephen Miller and “Birth Tourism”

If you believe a child born to a foreign mother flying over US airspace is an automatic American then you do not believe in citizenship.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) July 1, 2026

To begin with, we have to acknowledge that “birth tourism” is real. But it’s also minuscule:

Though hard to know for certain, the most expansive albeit contested estimate based on review of U.S. Census Bureau data is that up to 26,000 babies born in the United States annually could be attributed to birth tourism—a tiny fraction of the more than 3.5 million U.S. births yearly. Yet the idea has nonetheless taken center stage in the Trump administration’s campaign against the guarantee of birthright citizenship. An executive order, issued by President Donald Trump on his first day back in office, would limit automatic citizenship to children born to at least one U.S.-citizen or lawful permanent resident parent.

We should pause here to note Trump’s order changes the constitutional requirement from jus soli to jus sanguinus, a citizenship standard only recognized in this country by statute for children born to American parents overseas. It has never been the law of the land, and is clearly not the standard in the 14th amendment, yet three justices would rewrite the first clause of that amendment. Never let me hear again about “activist judges” rewriting the law.

Birth tourism is, as I said, real:

The Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, has attracted special scrutiny since it allows visa-free entry to nationals of certain countries. Congressional Republicans have specifically raised concerns about Chinese women using the territory to gain U.S. citizenship for their baby. The issue also received attention after authorities in 2015 raided “maternity hotels” in Southern California used by Chinese women. The prevalence of Russian women giving birth in South Florida has also generated headlines.

The federal government has advanced a number of initiatives to address birth tourism. These include criminal prosecutions of people linked to birth tourism schemes and a 2020 regulation rendering inadmissible women with a tourist visa who are found to be traveling primarily to the United States to give birth. In 2024, the government modified a visa-free program for the Northern Mariana Islands amid concerns about birth tourism abuses. And this April, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched an initiative to investigate birth tourism networks.

In defending the executive order, the Trump administration has asserted that limiting birthright citizenship to lawfully present and long-term foreign-born residents is the only way to address birth tourism. Critics of the executive order argue these concerns can be effectively addressed by means short of undermining a touchstone constitutional protection with deep roots in U.S. history. Opponents also note that the number of babies who would lack U.S. citizenship at birth would far surpass those born as the result of birth tourism.

Following the Barbara decision there was renewed (racist) concern from the administration (and a revived reference to “communist” China, not coincidentally) about Chinese mothers coming to America, but silence on the Russia connection. I don’t have a problem with limiting “birth tourism.” But that’s not what Trump is trying to do.

One great irony of this is that Trump’s policy would create an entire class of stateless persons.

The order would lead to an estimated 255,000 babies born in the United States annually without U.S. citizenship to parents who are either unauthorized immigrants or on long-term temporary visas, according to Migration Policy Institute (MPI) calculations. Accounting for other demographic trends, MPI estimates ending birthright citizenship could increase the size of the unauthorized population by up to an additional 2.7 million people by 2045 and 5.4 million by 2075.

Unless the countries of their parents recognize jus sanguinus, those children would not be citizens anywhere. Not that this administration cares; the parents and their children are non-persons in the eyes of Stephen Miller.

How many children are we talking about? The 26,000 number comes from an anti-immigration think tank. The CDC puts the number at 9600, based on birth mothers listing foreign home addresses. Either way, in a nation with 3.5 million births a year, it’s barely a drop in the demographic bucket. 🪣 

Again, this is a subject Congress can address:

Birth tourism, the contemporary phrase, was preceded by the pejorative term “anchor baby,” used since the 1970s to describe the practice by principally Mexican immigrants crossing the border to have a baby who would be a U.S. citizen and could eventually sponsor their extended family to immigrate legally. Without knowing the prevalence of this phenomenon, Congress quietly addressed the issue in the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1976. The 1976 act for the first time applied an age requirement of 21 to sponsor a relative from the Western Hemisphere for a green card, effectively ending the ability of minor children to act as “legal anchors” for relatives. Though birth tourism was not explicitly mentioned in the law, an internal State Department memo acknowledged the phenomenon, claiming that the provision was necessary because “large numbers of natives of Mexico have qualified to immigrate to the United States as parents of minor United States citizen children.”

But the Trump Administration isn’t interested in governance. It is only interested in ruling.

The administration has focused significant attention in its second term on immigration enforcement, including in its public argument to end birthright citizenship. It is therefore intriguing that birth tourism, a heretofore fringe issue in American politics with occasional media splashes, featured so prominently in the legal debate.

When and why that shift happened is unclear. What is evident, however, is that birth tourism is an extremely small phenomenon with no sign of becoming more pronounced. It has raised critical challenges—including visa fraud, tax evasion, business ethics, and access to medical care—that cut across multiple policy lenses including immigration, economics, and national security.

But some of these concerns have already been addressed by executive actions taken by prior administrations, including the 2020 regulation prohibiting use of B-2 visas exclusively for birth tourism, investigations and prosecutions of birth tourism facilitators, and increased screening of pregnant tourists to ensure they can pay for maternity and neonatal care. More recently, advocates seeking to limit the practice have proposed enhancing cooperation with international and national law enforcement agencies to target the businesses facilitating birth tourism. Other policy proposals have included greater scrutiny of pregnant tourists, stricter airline measures restricting how far along in their pregnancy women are able to fly, and increased consequences for those who engage in birth tourism. In addition, calls for increased data collection—to accurately measure the scope and scale of birth tourism—have sounded across the political spectrum.

These measures, if adequately resourced and properly implemented, show that policymakers can respond to the challenge of birth tourism without weakening the Constitution. Birthright citizenship has been regarded as a fundamental American principle of inclusivity and a constitutionally guaranteed protection written 150 years ago to end a troubling legacy of slavery. Undoing this principle to address a small-scale policy issue discounts the many other potential consequences of ending birthright citizenship.

I disagree that the first clause of the 14th was only intended “to end a troubling legacy of slavery.” I would argue it was intended to add an even more enduring legacy in America: racism. After all, when the Supreme Court first ruled on the 14th amendment’s citizenship clause, it was when the Chinese Exclusion Act was still law. It was under the provisions of that Act that Mr. Ark was denied entry back into his home country, making him essentially a stateless person. 

Four Supreme Court justices 133 years later, seem to be fine with that. Time really is a flat circle.⭕️