President Donald Trump kept yet another of his campaign promises this week, announcing Thursday that he’s shutting down the “maternity hotels.” The State Department doesn’t believe that visiting our great country for the sole purpose of getting your offspring a U.S. birth certificate is a “legitimate activity.”
Anchor babies are a big deal because squirting a baby out like it was a watermelon seed starts the “chain migration” process in motion. The parents are now related to a “citizen.” Soon come the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in a big long chain.
Back in 2015, Trump warned the Orlando Sunshine Summit that the problem was totally out of control. “you’re illegal, you come down, you sit down, you have your baby, and we take care of the baby for the next 85 years.” Last August, he reminded voters he hadn’t forgotten the issue. “You walk over the border, have a baby. Congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen. It’s, frankly, ridiculous.”
The new policy goes into effect on Friday, January 24, according to a cable sent out by the State Department to embassies around the globe. Last year, as part of a crackdown, the Department of Justice charged three people with funneling Chinese “birth tourists” into Southern California.
They raided literally dozens of “maternity hotels,” described by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “upscale apartments, where mothers-to-be paid between $15,000 and $50,000 to give birth in the U.S.”
Each year, 33,000 anchor babies are born to parents who are illegal aliens, temporary foreign workers, or temporary foreign visitors. Exact numbers on babies born specifically to tourists aren’t kept, but a reasonable estimate is that “approximately 9,300 children were born in the United States to mothers who live overseas in 2017, with an additional 900 born in U.S. territories,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
As noted by the statement issued by officials, “This rule reflects a better policy, as birth tourism poses risks to national security.” Because it is a black market smuggling operation to bring the women in, “The birth tourism industry is also rife with criminal activity, including international criminal schemes.”
Instead of turning a blind eye to the criminals like Barack Obama’s administration did, Trump is going after the people running these operations. The violators are being prosecuted at the federal level.
The State Department is quick to reassure all the touchy progressives that they aren’t going to be asking all the female applicants if they’re pregnant. That’s not against the law. Officials “will only raise the issue if they have ‘a specific articulable reason’ to believe the sole purpose of the U.S. visit is to give birth.”
One thing that will be insisted on is that if a woman does come over here pregnant, she has the means to pay for her medical care. “No U.S. law bars foreign women from traveling to the United States to give birth, although consular officers previously could require visitors to prove they have the financial means to pay for a medical procedure if that is the reason for the trip.”