President Donald Trump wants the government to sell citizenship for $5 million via a “Gold Card,” but lax border laws allow companies to privately sell citizenship at birth for several thousand dollars going straight into their pockets.
In Florida, an immigrant Brazilian doctor named Wladimir Lorentz told the Washington Post that he helped provide slices of Americans’ valuable citizenship to 2,500 infants and their parents at a cost of roughly $20,000 per birth:
His company, Have My Baby in Miami, opened in 2015. The service was focused on medical care — connecting international mothers to a multilingual team of care providers — but also gave expectant families information on how to speak to immigration officials and collect U.S. documents after their child’s birth.
The parents who are grabbing shares of Americans’ citizenship for their children — and their many descendants — say they are doing Americans a favor. “We are delivering our greatest asset to the United States,” mother Vanessa Vieira told the Post. “We want him to return and bring good things to the United States.”
The process for Brazilian parents is simple and cheap, the Washington Post wrote:
The couple already had U.S. tourist visas. All that was left to do was get on a plane, find a place to stay and wait for their American baby to arrive. “My daughter’s children and grandchildren will then have citizenship, too,” [Lavinia] Naue rejoiced. “She can pass it down through the generations.”
The parents also gain from the deal. Once the newborn children turn 21, they can request green cards and citizenship for their parents.
Meanwhile, Trump is trying to persuade wealthy foreigners to pay $5 million for “Gold Card” green cards and citizenship.
“Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card,” he told reporters in an Oval Office press event. “They’ll be successful and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people .”
“We’ll be able to sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that,” Trump predicted on February 25.
The United States government accepts roughly one million legal immigrants per year, usually for the minimal cost of the paperwork.
Trump wants his Gold Card business to replace the government’s small-scale EB-5 program which sells roughly 10,000 green cards each year.
Foreign investors get their family packets of green cards by lending approximately $1 million to a U.S. business that creates at least 10 jobs for at least a few years. The EB-5 program is “a way to get a green card that was low priced,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told the reporters. It is “full of nonsense, make-believe, and fraud,” he said.
Trump has largely stopped illegal migration over the southern border and is now trying to end the policy of granting citizenship to foreign children who are born on U.S. soil.
His policy change would withhold citizenship from the children of “birth tourists” and the children of illegal migrants. Those two groups add up to roughly 400,000 cases in 2024, or roughly 1-in-9 births that year.
The policy is based on a careful reading of U.S. history and law, and it will be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court: “Whether through an outright legal victory at the Supreme Court or the combination of legal victories and a political victory in a Republican-controlled Congress, there thus appears to be a clear path for the president to deliver on that promise,” Breitbart News reported in February.
Any policy fix would require cooperation from the Department of State which grants visas to foreigners, and the Department of Homeland Security which checks arriving visitors at the border for possible entry or rejection.
Other countries have moved against the birth-tourism business as Chinese, Indian, and Russian parents grab citizenship in Canada, Argentina, and other countries. For example, Ireland ended birth citizenship in a 2004 ballot.
In general, liberal Democrats and business-first Republicans support birth tourism and birthright citizenship because it grows the pool of potential Democratic voters and the pool of consumers, workers, and renters.
In January, CNN asked CNN in Connecticut Attorney General William Tong about birth tourism, and the Democrat replied: “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.”
But the huge inflow of migrants is a huge loss for 300 million ordinary Americans. They lose earning power in the labor and housing markets, and they lose investment, productivity, and training once provided by employers. They lose white-collar career opportunities to corporate outsourcing, civic stability amid government-imposed social diversity, and political power as expanding blocs of ethnic voters demand benefits for their communities, cultures, and home countries. Americans also lose confidence as the government’s migration policy crudely works to extract human resources from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy.
Thirty percent of registered voters strongly favor Trump’s citizenship change, while 27.5 percent of registered voters strongly oppose a change, according to a poll by Emerson College.
Even President Joe Biden’s deputies shut down a few birth tourism businesses. In January, Breitbart News reported:
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.”
“None of the six birth tourist families interviewed by The Post felt as though they’d abused the U.S. immigration system,” the Washington Post reported. “They said they’d entered the country legally and paid all their bills.”
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