A federal judge in California recently sentenced a woman to 41 months in prison for helping pregnant Chinese women travel to the United States to deliver babies who automatically became U.S. citizens.
Phoebe Dong and her now-separated husband Michael Liu were convicted in September of conspiracy and money laundering through their company, USA Happy Baby.
Federal prosecutors say the couple helped more than 100 pregnant Chinese women travel to the United States. Prosecutors say that for tens of thousands of dollars each, the defendant helped her numerous customers deceive U.S. authorities and buy U.S. citizenship for their children.
Ira Mehlman is media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform or FAIR. He says this is another example of why birthright citizenship must end.
"Here you have both people here in the United States who are profiting from this, and you have the birth tourists themselves who are misrepresenting their reasons for being allowed to enter the United States. That actually is a crime. Something that needs to stop."
Mehlman hopes that the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold President Trump's executive order banning birthright citizenship.
Last week a Reagan-appointed judge in Seattle temporarily blocked the order from taking effect, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Eighteen states, along with the city of San Francisco and the District of Columbia, have filed lawsuits challenging the order.
They argue the Constitution is clear on the matter, though the administration is expected to say the Consitution’s jurisdiction language allows for different interpretation.
The next hearing on the case is scheduled for Feb. 5 in Maryland.
Abuse of system has been around
Mehlman says birth tourism is nothing new.
“It’s nothing new at all. It's not just from China, it's from many, many different parts of the world, and it tends to be the more affluent in those countries. They’re the ones who can afford to pay these people who facilitate this. So, this is not a case of destitute people trying to come here. This is affluent people in most cases trying to take advantage of a flaw in our system."
