The State Department will deny visas to foreigners who run or help run birth tourism operations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the restrictions Wednesday under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that lets the secretary declare a foreigner inadmissible on foreign policy grounds.
The policy covers the people who own, run, and manage commercial birth tourism networks. It also covers visa “fixers” who coach applicants on how to lie, along with foreign doctors who knowingly help arrange the travel and the fraudulent use of Medicaid. Certain family members can be swept in too.
Rubio said these networks advertise openly, walk clients through false visa applications, and charge tens of thousands of dollars to set up a birth in the United States.
“The United States will not allow foreigners to exploit our immigration system,” he said.
Pregnant foreigners can still travel to the United States, and the restrictions apply only to people the administration decides are knowingly working the commercial side of it.
State has been at this since summer. Its Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force revoked more than 600 visas in its first month, and Rubio said in August that American citizenship is “not for sale.”
Rubio’s announcement landed hours before President Donald Trump greeted Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews for a three-day state visit, though the policy names no country.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) introduced a bill last week that would treat recruiting or harboring a pregnant alien for this purpose as trafficking, carrying up to 15 years per offense. “America is not the world’s maternity ward,” the South Carolina Republican said.
The restrictions follow the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision rejecting Trump’s birthright citizenship order and two executive orders he signed in August, handing the birth tourism fight to the State Department and Homeland Security.
Center for Immigration Studies research director Steven Camarota told a House Oversight task force this month that 200,000 to 300,000 children were born to birth tourists over the last decade.
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