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Pregnant women in China are striving to give their newborn babies a great gift—U.S. citizenship. At a cost of well over $10,000, women like Wang Rong from Beijing feel that the necessary financial sacrifice is well worth the benefits their babies will ultimately reap.
From China Daily:
The expenditure will cover all costs, including services before departure, medical care in the US and a three-month stay there, thanks to the help of a Shanghai-based agency that specializes in taking mainland moms to North America.
“Given the quality of educational resources and employment prospects in China, where there is a huge population and harsh competition, I want my baby to win at the starting line by obtaining US citizenship,” she said.
When I was fifteen or so, I went to the (assume a snobby voice here) the-a-tre in Boston with a bunch of friends to see Miss Saigon. If you haven’t seen it, you really should because it’s freaking amazing I won’t ruin the storyline any more than saying that there is a Vietnamese woman, Kim, who conceives a baby with an American G.I. during the Vietnam War. Kim wants desperately for her little boy to grow up American, and the lengths to which she’ll go—and the heartbreak she endures—are just gut-wrenching. [Ed. Note: Miss Saigon -- amazing. GO. NOW.]
I cry at the movies a lot (most recently with Toy Story 3 — oh my God, I had no idea that a Disney/Pixar flick could cut so deeply), but I have never experienced anything like the vicarious grief that poured out of a fifteen-year-old me at the Wang Center. I almost didn’t mention Miss Saigon, by the way, since I don’t want anyone to think that I’m lumping Chinese and Vietnamese women together, but the visceral connection I’m feeling through writing on this topic makes it impossible to ignore.
I was just talking to my mother about this story, and she got a little teary-eyed and said, “Leave it to a mother to sacrifice everything for her child.”
But is it a fair sacrifice? According to Jiang Feng, the Chinese partner of the agency that orchestrates this, there are many benefits for these babies, not the least of which is an almost guaranteed spot at an American university. This is great for those children offered dual citizenship, but there are some sticking points:
Most parents come from affluent families in cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou. Some are motivated by the chance to get US citizenship for their babies, others want to evade China’s family planning policy, which restricts most urban couples to one child, he said.
Usually, parents use tourist visas to travel to the US when the pregnancy is in the sixth or seventh month. Typically, they stay for between three and six months, then return with their new arrivals.
The thing is, these affluent families are the same ones with a stronger chance of a degree of success in China. I can’t help but feel that babies born to poor mothers in China are getting completely shafted here.
And then there’s the whole dancing a tightrope between legal and illegal immigration, if you think about it:
The US remains the largest country among about 30 worldwide, including Argentina and Brazil, that grants automatic citizenship to all babies born there, regardless of parents’ nationality and status.
Experts estimate at least 400,000 babies are born in the US each year and given citizenship, despite the fact that they do not have a parent who is a US citizen or a permanent legal immigrant.
Most children getting US citizenship in that way are born to international students, foreign travelers, temporary foreign workers and illegal immigrants.
Such babies with families that largely live on welfare are known as “anchor babies” and are seen as a burden on the US economy, reports said.
Critics in the US have called for a change in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution’s definition of birthright citizenship, claiming it is an impediment to stabilizing the US population. They say it also hurts environmental sustainability and is a potential incentive for illegal immigrants.
This is a loophole that I have a hard time with on at least a couple of levels. Ahem.
First, however you feel about illegal immigration through the Mexican border, the stories that you hear are often quite disturbing. I can’t blame immigrants for making an effort to cross the border to better their own lives and, yes, their children’s as well. I mean, if I lived in an oppressive, poverty-stricken place with no hope of any sort of better life for my children, you’d better believe I’d be doing anything in my power to get to the famously better existence just a border patrol away. Life is bleak for many Mexican citizens, and it seems pretty unfair that wealthy Chinese women are able to jump around this.
Also, there are countless American children born to U.S. citizens living in terrible poverty. For many of these kiddos, higher education is pretty much off the table. Is it fair to open up a pretty much guaranteed ride to college to a child that shoots down a vaginal canal, has a record made of said event, then goes back to his or her native country in a matter of weeks?
My life is spent doing everything in my power to make life better for children. I am an English teacher, but the scope is so much larger than defining what a gerund is and running essays through Google to make sure there’s no plagiarism going on (and laughing a lot, although that is important). As such, I cannot help but brood about the horribly limited futures faced by so many children — American, Chinese, Mexican, whatever. It’s just so, so sad.
What are your thoughts on this practice? I’m going to go turn my iPod to the Miss Saigon soundtrack now …
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We thought of having Baby Goo, who was born in Canada and has dual Canadian/Australian citizenship across the boarder to get her US citizenship as well, but in the end it was too expensive. So she can just take her two citizenships and like them.
Oh great, that is exactly what this country needs, gooood tiiiiimes
Why is this suddenly branded EB?
Oh
Why’d you axe the Recent Comments thing? It’s far too inconvenient to try to follow comment threads without it.
CHHHHHILLL. We’re relaunching the site tonight. There are still plenty of changes to come, and a nifty “Feedback” bar on the right for you to leave your comments/complaints.
I’m so confused!
Neat
The only bitch I have is in the feedback, to “like” something you have to sign in to facebook/google/twitter. Is there no way I could simply “like” something without leaving a link to real life me or signing up for a service?
Ewwww…. You’ve turned the site into a tabloid. It’s awful! Random crap all over the place, massive purple on the sides, and a tiny little column of text. This is terrible to read!
I don’t like that our immigration policy has such a huge loophole that can be exploited by tourists. This is nothing like the Mexican immigrants who have children here in hopes of being able to stay here and better their lives. This is the equivalent of a Louis Vitton or Coach bag for most of these women, it’s a status symbol. Are there any other countries that allow for this sort of thing, a tourist stopping in for a sight see, a birthing, and a citizenship?
My thoughts exactly, these aren’t the babies that will be utilizing any sort of social assistance.
I know that the US loves to cry that people are a drain on the government/social programs/whatever….but there are countries (like Canada) that also have this practice who have WAY more to offer (and abuise) in terms of social assistance. This definitely isn’t an issue that is owned (or even championed) by the US.
This is not a “status symbol”. It is a rather ingenious way of exploiting an existing loophole in the law. I think it is rather presumptive to say that this is the equivalent of some kind of expensive fashion accessory. If anything it is like purchasing an option of a better future for the children.
Well,were certainly not going to do anything to piss off China,they’re purchasing our debt securities. It would be nice to do wonderful things for all the worlds children,but guess what,we need to worry about American kids first. How cold of me!
I feel the same way … it’s why I teach in a small, rural school in New Hampshire instead of jetting to Beijing :-) I just get overwhelmed when I think of children in bad situations.
Its not one world,thats for sure. You can spend one hour on the streets of Mexico and it will bother you forever.
This practice maybe common enough to warrant discussion, but to frame it along side the issue with mexican immigrants is a little off. For one thing, I would suspect that having “anchor” babies as a means of eventual relocation is far more common with Mexican immigrants, as ease of movement between the two countries is more certain. You seem to think that it is unfair that the Chinese women are unfairly jumping around the difficulty of hoping the border by being “tourists”, but I wonder if you think that mexican woman who can afford it don’t do the same thing? (and by the way… one of the most common ways for Asian immigrants to illegally immigrate is to be “shipped” in via shipping containers, a long journey confined to a big metal box with a dozen other people… it is not exactly glamorous, and at least on the same level of desperation as walking through the desert).
As far as the suspected affluence of the parents, I would say that this is slightly overstated. In the article it says that the couple earns about 250 thousand yuan a year, which translates to about $35,000 a year. Though this certainly puts them economically ahead of the vast majority of their fellow citizens, it may not be as such in Beijing where they are likely to be lower middle class. So what they are doing with having the baby in the US is a long term investment in the child’s future, though a tenuous one because there is no dual nationality between the US and China. If at some point in the future the couple or the child are forced to assert one nationality the other will be voided immediately.
The birth right citizenship is an interesting loophole that has a lot to do with the interaction between technology and law. When the amendment was introduced it was very unlikely that a person residing in the US at the time was going to not be living there in the future. It took an incredibly long time to get to the US from most of the other countries in the world, and so an effort to get there was usually a sign that they were going to stay (not with standing the rare cases of tourism). Modern technology and infrastructure basically allows a person to cross a border and be in a major city within a matter of hours. The child being born (generally at the local taxpayers expense) makes deportation very difficult from both a logistical and ethical standpoint.
The key problem with discussion of this aspect of the amendment is that it is difficult to see how to fix it without coming very close to infringing on the rights it was meant to protect. What is your suggestion?
I am not sure of where the idea of a “guaranteed ride” to college comes from. I wonder if you have mistaken the phrase “free ride” with the concept of ease of basic access to State universities. These kids are not likely to have their educations paid for by the state (though they may be subsidized in part in the case of state universities), but as US citizens (at least on paper) they are likely to be accepted if they meet the admission requirements, but will then need to find some way to actually pay for the cost of tuition (all of the cost of their K-12 education will be paid for in China, at Chinese schools, which will likely mean that by the age of 12 they will be better educated in math and science than most high school grads in the US). Contrast this with mexican immigrants, who will almost certainly be living at or below the poverty level in the US because their parents will be undocumented and thus forced to menial labor and low wage jobs, and thus have all of their education paid for by the state (K-12 at least).
There is no simple solution to these problems, and trying to fix them will likely lead to unintended consequences far worse than the problems that were attempted to be fixed.
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America needs to control its population and resources.