MAGA Stephen Miller and the cult are obsessed with "birthright citizenship" but their objections are racist propaganda

What Trump gets wrong about ‘birth tourism’ (Frankly, there is no such thing.....women of other nationalities do not give birth in the U.S. as "tourists".....they want their children to have access to American passports for the purpose of being able to apply for American education in private schools, colleges and universities.  Also, these women, regardless of where they came from, pay cash for their labor and delivery.  Thousands of American women are the mothers who need Medicaid, not the immigrants.)

Echo report published in the Boston Globe by Amy Reed Sandoval

The right-wing panic over birthright citizenship is built on a simple tale of foreigners gaming the system. My interviews with Mexican mothers at the border tell a very different story.

Amy Reed-Sandoval is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of the book “Intimate Borders: Feminist Migration Ethics.”

Donald Trump isn’t giving up on his quest to get rid of birthright citizenship. In August, he signed two new executive orders cracking down on so-called birth tourism to the United States. Stephen Miller, his homeland security adviser, said “people come here, pretend to be a tourist … say they want to go to Disneyland.

“But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, leave our country. ... It gives them access under this broken system to welfare benefits … and all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans.” (HELLO❓But even many needy Americans are unable to access these "rights".)

Condemnation of birth tourism has become Trump’s go-to argument for attacking birthright citizenship, the right, a century and a half old, granting citizenship to individuals who are born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ nationality.

The Trump administration even deployed this argument when it asked the Supreme Court to get rid of birthright citizenship. The court upheld that right last month. But the administration’s rhetoric seemed to have some effect: Justice Clarence Thomas devoted much of his dissent to describing the abuses of birth tourism.

But the Trump administration’s preoccupation with birth tourism is an obsession and not justifiable.

Start with this: The documented number of cases of pregnant women coming into the country just to give birth to an American citizen is very small. In fact, a recent Penn State study showed that “birth tourism accounts for fewer than 0.3 percent of all US births in any year between 2014-2024.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2024 about 9,500 babies were born to mothers with addresses abroad. The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative group that supports immigration restrictions, put the number of potential birth tourism births at 20,000 to 26,000 in its most recent estimate, still only a small fraction of births to mothers who do not live in the United States.

MAGA's Miller, Thomas, and Trump act as though there aren’t safeguards in place to prevent birth tourism. But though it’s true that there is a cottage industry of businesses that charge wealthy foreigners tens of thousands of dollars for private coaching on how to give birth in the United States, the US government has always had the power to deny visas to people whose motives they deem suspect. If a couple misrepresents their intentions for visiting the United States, that is considered visa fraud. And the Justice Department has already prosecuted travel agencies found to be promoting birth tourism.

The Make America Great Again birth tourism narrative — that women come here to access welfare benefits or get US citizenship themselves — offers a warped and simplistic vision of the motivations that foreigners have for giving birth in the United States. In reality, their reasons are complex. I interviewed 30 Mexican women living in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso who had crossed the border from Mexico to give birth. All had legal permission to enter the United States, and all had paid out of pocket for their health care. Still, they were regularly treated by many immigration officers and medical professionals as if they were doing something illegal.

I asked the women to tell me their reasons for giving birth in the United States. And they agreed to speak with me as long as they could remain anonymous.

“I knew I had to move my family to the United States to receive prenatal care,” one woman said while rocking her napping daughter in her arms in their El Paso home. “My baby could come at any minute, and I was told my own life was in danger.”

Some women told me that they had no intention of permanently relocating themselves or their families to the United States; they simply wanted to give their children a broader array of life options. Relatedly, one woman told me that she is concerned about gender-based violence on both sides of the US-Mexico border — but particularly about high rates of femicides in Mexico. When she found out she was going to give birth to a girl, she decided she wanted to give her daughter legal options for international migration if she needed to relocate for her safety.

“It’s better to have two citizenships than one,” she told me over a heaping plate of flautas in a downtown El Paso restaurant. She had just crossed the border from Ciudad Juárez — where she and her family still live — for a day of shopping and errands. “If things get really bad here [in Mexico], she won’t have to suffer through the process of asking for asylum.”

Another woman told me that she decided to have her baby in the United States because there was a chance that her husband, who is employed as a truck driver, was going to be transferred from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso. She was preparing to keep the family together.

“But it would have been much easier for me to give birth in Ciudad Juárez; I would have preferred it!” she lamented during our interview at her kitchen table. And one woman told me that she felt that giving birth in the United States would make her a “true fronteriza,” a true woman of the borderlands, with deepened cultural and political ties to both the United States and Mexico.

Some reported that they wanted to give their children the opportunity to connect with relatives in the United States, many of whom are US citizens. Some said they wanted to have access to better health care in the event of pregnancy complications.



Of course, my sample size of 30 was small, and I only interviewed middle-class women with legal permission to enter the United States.

However, it is clear from what I and other scholars have been able to document that there is little chance that hoards of migrant women masquerading as Disneyland tourists are dipping into the social welfare systems by way of their deviant childbirth practices.

These arguments may not convince people who are determined to see the end of birthright citizenship. But it’s simply not true that birth tourism is a large enough issue to warrant skewering a constitutional right, and the over-the-top rhetoric inflicts real harm.

This birth tourism myth gets used to justify holding nearly 70,000 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers across this country, 70 percent of whom have not been charged with any crime. This dangerous myth also supports sexist ideas, as reflected in a statement by MAGA lawyer Mike Davis, who called on Trump to “get these pregnant women and women who could be pregnant the hell out of our country,” and in another by Sean Davis, CEO of the right-wing media outlet The Federalist, who called for the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

The MAGA birth tourism myth is just that, a myth. Its job is not to address a real problem but to dismantle a cherished constitutionally protected right.

Post Script, this article is focused on Mexican women. Reed-Sandoval overlooks the other nationalities of women who chose to give birth in the United States for the purpose of obtaining American passports for their babies at birth. This makes it it easier for their children to attend American schools, colleges and universities. Plus, all of these transactions are paid with cash, the pre-natal care, the labor, delivery and the tuitions to attend American private schools, colleges and universities. Stephen Miller's objection to "birthright citizenship" is entirely racist.