The MAGA 'Anchor Baby' Myth Doesn't Hold Water
America should welcome birth tourists because they generate taxpaying citizens without the US having to invest in them
Folarin Balogun was the breakout star of the U.S. men’s soccer team in this year’s World Cup, scoring three goals, the most by an American since 2010. But he was able to join the Yank squad only by an accident of birth. His Nigerian parents, who lived in London, visited the United States when his expectant mother was seven months along. When they tried to return home, the airline refused to let her board because of her advanced pregnancy. She had to deliver in Brooklyn, making her son an American as provided in the 14th Amendment.
On the first day of his second term, Donald Trump issued an executive order revoking the rule that anyone born on U.S. soil automatically becomes one of us. But just days after a divided Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, the president intervened on behalf of this particular birthright citizen. Trump apparently persuaded the sport’s international governing body to let Balogun play in the knockout match against Belgium despite getting a red card in the previous contest, which automatically disqualified him. If he was aware of the irony, Trump gave no sign.
Those in the MAGA movement bitterly resent that infants born to foreign parents, including unauthorized immigrants, are granted full and permanent membership in our national community. “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits,” Trump said, falsely, in 2018. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.” In his dissent in the birthright citizenship decision, Justice Samuel Alito expressed alarm at “‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home.” After the ruling came down, a sarcastic Trump took to Truth Social to “congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN!”
There are many good reasons for preserving birthright citizenship, as the court did. Among them are longstanding common law practice, constitutional precedent, and the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment. Practical considerations also support it. Revoking birthright citizenship would have the perverse effect of greatly increasing the number of undocumented foreigners living here by making many newborns non-citizens. A study by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute concluded that:
ending birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children with parents who are either unauthorized immigrants or temporary visa holders (or a combination of the two) would increase the unauthorized population by an additional 2.7 million by 2045 and by 5.4 million by 2075. Each year, an average of about 255,000 babies born on U.S. soil would start life without U.S. citizenship based on their parents’ legal status.
Why birth tourism should bother the president and his supporters is a bit of a puzzle. Americans who oppose immigration often allege that foreigners who migrate here take jobs, drive up housing prices, sponge off taxpayer-provided benefits, congregate in clannish enclaves, and implant alien religions and customs. So you would think the critics would take a benign view of foreigners who come briefly and immediately leave, interacting with hardly anyone and paying their own way before vanishing like footprints on an ocean beach.
The ‘Anchor Baby’ Hysteria
The longstanding complaint is that this option allows their citizen children—“anchor babies,” as they are misleadingly called—to sponsor parents for legal admission to the U.S. But kids can’t do that until they reach the age of 21, and after they do, the process of securing green cards can take a full decade. In the anchor baby scenario, an undocumented woman who gives birth on U.S. soil today may not gain legal status until 2057. Not many people want to play a game that takes that long. For the most part, the anchor is not attached to the boat.
There is no evidence that birthright citizenship is “a magnet for illegal immigration,” as Trump alleges. People come without authorization, or overstay their visas, for more immediate reasons: economic opportunity, education, family ties, the desire to escape from oppression, and the lure of our vibrant culture.
Historically, the great majority of undocumented migrants sneaking across our southern border are men. A study of Tijuana women who gave birth in California in the 1980s found that only 10% crossed the border for that purpose—which means that 90% of them didn’t. And that doesn’t account for all the women who came here but didn’t have babies. The anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies claims that as many as 25,500 babies are born in the U.S. each year to “birth tourists.” But that’s less than 1% of the 3.6 million births that take place annually. And the CIS estimate is probably excessive. Data from the Centers for Disease Control put the number at fewer than 10,000. Oh, and those “benefits” that infuriate Trump? He forgets that birth tourists return to where their parents live, which means that the cost of feeding, housing, medicating, and educating their kids falls on those countries, not us.
Trump fumes that we’re alone in automatically extending nationality to anyone born on our soil. In fact, the Pew Research Center reports, “Thirty-two other countries around the world, most of them in the Western Hemisphere, have birthright citizenship laws that are substantially similar to the U.S.” No European Union country does—and yet plenty of them, including Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, have large numbers of undocumented migrants. They go to those countries for many of the same reasons that foreigners come here.
The Bogus National Security Fears
Scaremongers invoke national security as a reason to abolish birthright citizenship. During the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case, Alito offered a hypothetical worry: “A boy is born in the U.S. to an Iranian father who has entered the country illegally. That boy is automatically an Iranian national at birth and he has a duty to provide military service to the Iranian government.” But the same would be true of a boy born in the U.S. to an Iranian father who is here legally. The same may be true if the parents, with valid visas, hail from Russia, Turkey, Israel, or South Korea, among other countries. Justice Clarence Thomas argued in dissent that the relevant test is whether a person is “amenable to the laws” of two governments at once. But as Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out in the majority opinion, if that’s the test, “then it is a test that every child born to a foreign parent fails—a result that even the principal dissent cannot stomach.” Not to mention that the risk is largely if not entirely imaginary.
Conservative author and researcher Peter Schweizer makes the audacious claim that some 100,000 Chinese babies are born here each year—the product of an alleged plot by the Beijing government to create a “Manchurian generation” of U.S. citizens whose true loyalty is to China. But that figure is several times what even CIS estimates for tourism births. And in testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Schweizer admitted that “our federal government has no clue” how many Chinese nationals have actually done this.
It’s true, as Thomas claims, that there is a small industry catering to foreigners who want their offspring to be American citizens. The Migration Policy Institute reports, “There has been a proliferation of companies advertising in China, Russia, and beyond their services to facilitate travel, visas, medical care, and other guidance for expectant mothers seeking to give birth in the United States. The fees reportedly range from $20,000 to $100,000.” But repealing birthright citizenship to address the problem would be like banning department stores to combat shoplifting. The State Department has long had a policy of denying visas to women suspected of coming here to give birth, and the Trump administration has boasted about its tough enforcement.
The Downside of Being a ‘Birth Tourism’ Baby
A U.S. passport is not an unmitigated blessing. The U.S. is one of only two countries, Eritrea being the other, that base taxation on citizenship rather than residency. So these U.S.-born foreign residents are obligated to pay taxes on their income regardless of where it is earned and even if they are subject to taxation by foreign governments.
Many American citizens living in Europe are dismayed to find that some banks refuse to let them open accounts, because of the burdensome reporting requirements imposed by Washington. Federal law obligates “non-U.S. banks to report information to the U.S. on accounts held by U.S. citizens,” notes Blick Rothenberg, a London tax accounting firm. “This applies even if a U.S. citizen lives outside the U.S. and has, at best, only limited financial links to the U.S. Failure to comply with this requirement can result in the non-U.S. bank being barred from doing any business in the U.S.” There is no exemption for foreigners who have never actually lived here and are citizens only because Mom delivered in an American hospital. No surprise, then, that some banks effectively invite Americans to find a good mattress in which to stash their funds.
The disadvantages are enough to make some people renounce their citizenship. But that’s no easy task. Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney (and The UnPopulist contributor), has a legal practice that includes renunciations, and she notes that anyone wanting out first has to fulfill their tax obligations for the past five years or more, which for someone who has not bothered filing can add up to a lot of money. There is also an exit tax that applies to anyone with a net worth of $2 million or more, or an annual income of $211,000 or more, as well as a processing fee of $450. Consular interviews are required. “The process is expensive and a lot of lawyers are involved,” says Stock. Some 5,000 people a year decide it’s worth the trouble, and not all of them out of disgust with the guy currently occupying the White House.
But there is a real upside for the children of birth tourism, whose very existence is a tribute to the ideals and opportunity that America has long represented among the nations of the world. It’s no mystery or scandal that some foreign parents want to secure American citizenship for their children. If you’re Chinese or Russian, it promises an eventual escape from political oppression. If you’re Mexican or Nigerian, you may see it as a future refuge from criminal violence. If you’re someone who values education, you may envision your child someday graduating from an American university. Or maybe you just love the American way of life.
These parents may regret that they themselves couldn’t find a legal way to become Americans and fervently want to confer that blessing on their kids. It’s hard to see why we should try to stamp out a practice that gives us something of immeasurable value: more Americans.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
 | A guest post by
|