Birth Tourism: A Closer Look at the Numbers and Impact

Birth tourism—the practice of pregnant women traveling to the United States on tourist visas to secure American citizenship for their newborns—has become a lightning rod in the ongoing debate about immigration and birthright citizenship. As the Supreme Court considers challenges to longstanding citizenship policies, questions about the scale and significance of birth tourism have taken center stage.

The federal government does not officially track birth tourism cases, creating a data vacuum that has allowed for varying interpretations of its prevalence. During Supreme Court arguments on April 1, Solicitor General D. John Sauer acknowledged this uncertainty when pressed by Chief Justice John Roberts about the scale of the issue, responding simply: “No one knows for sure.”

Despite this official uncertainty, estimates exist. The Center for Immigration Studies, an organization advocating for lower immigration levels, calculated that between 20,000 and 26,000 birth tourism cases may occur annually, based on their analysis of census data and birth records. While significant, this represents less than 1% of the 3.61 million births recorded in the United States in 2020.

Tom Homan, serving as Border Czar in the Trump administration, has described birth tourism as “a significant national security threat,” highlighting concerns about “hundreds of thousands” of Russian and Chinese nationals having children in the United States over decades. Former President Trump’s rhetoric has similarly emphasized high numbers, referring to “hundreds of thousands of people” engaging in the practice.

Evidence of organized birth tourism operations exists. In 2019, federal authorities announced their first major case targeting birth tourism, indicting three operators of Southern California facilities catering to Chinese clients. The investigation revealed sophisticated networks that coached pregnant women to lie on visa applications and conceal their pregnancies when entering the country. One operation claimed to have served over 8,000 pregnant women, charging between $40,000 and $80,000 for their services.

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Western Pacific, has also been identified as a birth tourism hub. At its peak in 2018, 581 births were registered to foreign tourists there. Following local and federal crackdown efforts, this number reportedly fell to just 47 by 2025.

In 2020, the Trump administration implemented a rule giving the State Department greater discretion to deny tourist visas to applicants suspected of traveling primarily for birth tourism purposes. The measure was described as making operations more difficult but not impossible.

Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute acknowledges birth tourism as a form of visa fraud but emphasizes its relatively small scale. “Birth tourism is an issue, there is no doubt,” she notes, while adding that “even the most expansive estimates” put the total at no more than 26,000 births annually.

Mittelstadt suggests several targeted approaches to address the issue without eliminating birthright citizenship entirely: tightening visa screening processes, explicit questioning about pregnancy status, implementing travel restrictions for late-term pregnancies, and more aggressively prosecuting birth tourism operators.

Steven Camarota from the Center for Immigration Studies agrees that focused enforcement could significantly reduce birth tourism without constitutional changes. “You probably can address a lot of it just by taking a forceful position,” he said. “You couldn’t eliminate it, but you probably could greatly curtail it with different State Department rules and different border controls.”

During Supreme Court arguments, Sauer suggested that birth tourism demonstrates how modern realities—”8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen”—could not have been anticipated by the framers of the 14th Amendment.

Chief Justice Roberts responded with a pointed observation that encapsulates the fundamental tension in the debate: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

The Supreme Court is expected to rule this summer on the challenge to President Trump’s executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are neither citizens nor legal permanent residents.