President Trump’s administration is readying a new rule to crack down on foreign nationals arriving in the United States on tourist and visitor visas only to deliver their children in the country to secure them birthright American citizenship, a new report states.
According to Axios, the new rule cracking down on what is commonly known as “birth tourism” could be issued this week and will give State Department officials the ability to deny B-1 and B-2 visas to foreign nationals whom they suspect are only coming to the U.S. to win birthright citizenship for their children.
“This change is intended to address the national security and law enforcement risks associated with birth tourism, including criminal activity associated with the birth tourism industry,” a State Department official told Axios in an interview.
One senior administration official said consular officers who issue B-1 and B-2 visas “are remarkably skilled at sussing out true versus false claims” and thus giving them the authority to deny visas on suspicion of birth tourism would be an effective tool to prevent foreign nationals from abusing the nation’s birthright citizenship policy.
As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, nearly 400,000 “anchor babies” are born every year in the U.S. to illegal aliens, foreign workers on temporary visas, and foreign nationals on visitor visas.
In 2019, the Justice Department led one of the largest criminal crackdowns ever on the birth tourism industry in California, where Chinese nationals allegedly ran businesses to bring foreign nationals to the U.S. on visitor visas for the sole purpose of winning their children birthright American citizenship.
Justice Department officials said the case revealed that more than 8,500 U.S.-born children to foreign nationals, almost exclusively from China, secured birthright American citizenship thanks to just three birth tourism businesses in California.
To date, the U.S. Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled that the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens must be granted automatic American citizenship, and a number of legal scholars dispute the idea.
Many leading conservative scholars argue the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment does not provide mandatory birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens or noncitizens, as these children are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction as that language was understood when the 14th Amendment was ratified.
For almost two years, Trump has signaled that he has reviewed signing an executive order to end birthright citizenship, otherwise known as the “anchor baby policy.” That executive order, though, has yet to come up for consideration.
Today, there are at least 4.5 million anchor babies in the U.S. under 18-years-old, exceeding the annual roughly four million American babies born every year and costing American taxpayers about $2.4 billion every year to subsidize hospital costs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.