At long last, President Trump plans to crack down on one of the least sympathetic and perhaps most dangerous forms of immigration. The State Department will soon selectively restrict visas in an attempt to protect the nation from “birth tourism,” the practice of pregnant women, mostly exorbitantly wealthy ones with severe anti-American animus, coming to the country to give birth and eventually game the chain migration system to obtain citizenship for themselves.
Naturally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has to come out against the overdue proposal.
Contrary to AOC’s usually uninformed declaration, Trump isn’t targeting the vulnerable. Instead, he’s rightly targeting some of the most spoiled and anti-democratic women on the planet and preventing them from infiltrating our immigration system.
Unlike Trump’s abominable plot to abolish birthright citizenship, the administration has the absolute right to restrict visas from those with malicious intentions. And unlike plenty of his attempts to crack down on migrants coming from the southern border, birth tourists tend to be the least sympathetic kinds of migrants. They’re not lawful student visa-holders who came to the country to attend college but wind up giving birth as well. They’re not escaping gang violence in the Northern Triangle on foot and seeking refugee status or illegally crossing the Rio Grande. It’s hard to nail down an exact figure because the birth tourism industry operates outside of the law, but it seems as though most birth tourists range from the rich to the ultrarich, predominately hailing from Russia, China, and Turkey.
Russian elites regularly shell out tens of thousands of dollars to deliver their children in Miami. A birth tourism package including a gold-tiled Trump Tower apartment and a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz goes for $84,700.
Chinese patrons of a multimillion-dollar birth tourism enterprise paid six figures for packages that included nannies and shopping sprees at Gucci.
The Turkish-owned Marmara Manhattan charges its countrymen $45,000 for a birth tourism package in its Upper East Side hotel.
Standing law allows “birth tourism” only if pregnant visa applicants explicate that their purpose is to give birth on American soil and prove that they can afford it, but the birth tourism industry has thrived at helping tens of thousands of women annually skirt the rules. The result is facilities staffed by modern-day slaves to conceal the illegal intentions of wealthy elites attempting to manipulate chain migration to gain citizenship for themselves.
Trump has missed the mark on immigration plenty of times, but this is certainly not one of them. Immigration restrictionists and those that believe our immigration system should reward those who need and deserve to join the American experiment the most ought to agree.
*story by The Washington Examiner