On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Laura Coates Live,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D) argued that it’s “a hateful fantasy” that people exploit birthright citizenship by engaging in birth tourism — which the Justice Department under the Biden administration has acknowledged exists and has secured convictions of and guilty pleas from individuals related to their operation of birth tourism schemes — and stated that “I don’t see evidence of it.”
Host Laura Coates asked, [relevant exchange begins around 16:35] “[T]here is an argument being made that people are engaged in — and the phrase they use is ‘birth tourism’, that it undermines the core principle of birthright citizenship and instead is being exploited. How do you combat that legally in your suit?”
Tong responded, “I think that’s a hateful fantasy, frankly, and I don’t see evidence of it. I see people who we need in Connecticut, who we need as part of our economy, people who are working, who are contributing, like my family, like my parents. They came here with nothing. They worked in a Chinese restaurant. They worked seven days a week, 12-15 hours a day. They worked themselves sick. I watched them do it. And, in one generation, I went from working side-by-side with my parents in a hot Chinese restaurant in Wethersfield, Connecticut to being the Attorney General of our state. That is the enduring beauty of our country. It is the core of the American Dream, and that’s what we’re fighting for.”
In 2024, the United States Justice Department secured criminal convictions against two California residents for “operating a ‘birth tourism’ scheme that charged Chinese clients tens of thousands of dollars to help them give birth in the United States to obtain birthright U.S. citizenship for their children.” In 2021, the DOJ secured a guilty plea from a Turkish national for “conspiring to commit health care and wire fraud in connection with a so-called ‘birth tourism’ scheme in Suffolk County between approximately 2017 and 2020. The scheme facilitated pregnant Turkish women fraudulently entering the United States using tourist and business visas to give birth so that their children would obtain birthright citizenship and medical benefits.”
In that 2021 case, a DHS official stated, “The criminality of birth tourism manipulates our visa and immigration systems and diverts precious financial resources from an already exhausted health care system that serves our local communities to combat COVID-19 and other critical needs.” And an article in the American Journal of Perinatology that was partially supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health studied the impact of birth tourism on neonatal health.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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