When the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on Wednesday about President Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship, lawyers for the government are likely to bring up a phenomenon known as “birth tourism.”
The term refers to pregnant women who travel to the United States to give birth so that their baby can have American citizenship. It is most commonly associated with a cottage industry of “maternity hotels” that has emerged over the past two decades and caters to wealthy families from countries like China, Turkey and Russia.
There is no official tally of babies born to tourists on American soil. In its most recent estimate in 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports restricting immigration, put the number at around 20,000 to 26,000 babies a year.
That is less than 1 percent of the number of babies born in the United States in 2020, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That year, the State Department also changed its regulations to empower its officers to deny visas to women who they thought might be engaging in birth tourism. Before that, birth tourism was often treated as a subset of medical tourism.
The phenomenon has remained a persistent concern for lawmakers. In 2019, federal authorities in Southern California arrested three people who operated multimillion-dollar birth tourism companies and had charged as much as $100,000 to Chinese couples for a package that included housing, nannies and shopping excursions to Gucci.
More recently, Republican lawmakers have cited birth tourism in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory that has looser visa requirements and is closer to China. Official data, however, has shown that such births have dropped off significantly to 47 births registered to foreign tourists in 2025, from the peak of 581 in 2018.
And wealthy Chinese have also been taking advantage of looser regulations in the United States to, in some cases, have dozens of American citizen children via surrogacy, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal and other outlets. Not all of the cases were necessarily birth tourism. In at least one high-profile case, the parents appeared to be raising the children in the United States.
Senator Rick Scott of Florida has introduced a bill that would prevent people from “adversarial nations” like China from having babies through surrogates in America.
Birth tourism “erodes our government’s ability to control who attains U.S. citizenship,” said Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies. “It’s fundamental to sovereignty — being able to determine who is a citizen.”
Proponents of birthright citizenship say that the scale of the problem is marginal. They argue that it can be addressed through regulation and law enforcement without eliminating what has long been considered a central tenet of the United States — equality at birth, regardless of race, religion or the immigration status of the parents.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell University, said, “The question is do you want to take a cudgel to fix that problem or a more surgical approach?”
Amy Qin is a national correspondent for The Times, writing primarily about Asian American communities.
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