A post on X about birth tourism that turned middle class Hondurans into Americans was exciting enough to get over 750,000 views:
Stories about Chinese birth tourism “rings” also reliably generate interest/outrage. Anyone with enough money to participate in a birth tourism scheme is from at least a middle class family in a foreign country and, therefore, is unlikely to become the founder of a multi-generational welfare dynasty. (Statistically, those who grow up in self-sufficient households are likely to be adults in self-sufficient households.)
Meanwhile, the US citizens being birthed by foreigners here “temporarily” under Temporary Protected Status, some since 1990, aren’t of interest. Neither Gemini nor ChatGPT could even begin to estimate how many foreigners, total, have spent time in the U.S. under TPS. Partly because of that, neither AI could begin to estimate how many children they’ve had, each one with a U.S. passport. The best that the AIs can do is come up with 1.3 million foreign TPS holders in the U.S. right now and possibly 390,000 U.S. citizen children living with them. Gemini estimates that the majority of TPS households with children are on what used to be called “welfare” (“safety-net participation”), but even AI probably can’t see into all of the state-run programs for which immigration status isn’t relevant, e.g., health care in California, public housing in Maskachusetts, etc. Our AI overlords say that the majority of children who in welfare-eligible households will grow up to adults living in welfare-eligible households (i.e., multi-generational welfare is the expectation, though at just over 50 percent). These stats are somewhat complicated by non-welfare welfare programs, e.g., the various below-market-rate rent schemes in New York City that cover more than half of rental units there.
During the entire time that the above-described Honduras-to-US pipeline was running, there was a 26-year “temporary” program to allow some favored subset of Hondurans to live in the U.S. There were over 100,000 Hondurans granted TPS during the program’s launch in 1999. Gemini says that almost no Honduran ever went back before Donald Trump ended their status and that almost none went home after the September 2025 termination either:
The termination of TPS did not grant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to summarily deport people. To be removed from the country, individuals who do not leave voluntarily must be issued a Notice to Appear (NTA) and go through the formal immigration court system.
With immigration courts already facing massive multi-million case backlogs, processing thousands of long-term residents with clean criminal histories and significant family equities in the U.S. takes years, effectively leaving them in a prolonged state of legal limbo within the United States.
So a handful of pregnant Hondurans with the family resources (maybe from U.S. relatives) to pay for roundtrip airfare to Boston generates outrage due to the resulting 10+ U.S.-born anchor babies. Not a single one of these kids has ever been on welfare, to my knowledge, unless we consider the taxpayer-funded hospital payments to be welfare. But perhaps 100,000 births to Hondurans here under TPS, nearly all of which were similarly paid for by taxpayers and then resulted in welfare eligibility for at least 18 years, aren’t interesting.
At the Berkeley commencement this year the student keynote speaker was this guy who had been born in the USA then promptly gone to live with his grandfather for his entire life. Then come back and gotten admitted to Berkeley which was presumably very impressed by his amazing background growing up in rural Northern India.
That’s pretty much been my complaint. Sure Indians are very smart. If they are so smart why didn’t they figure out a way to take advantage of birthright citizenship?
Birthright citizenship in the richest country in the world has to be an insane bug that is still not patched. I cannot believe it is real. I have a colleague who grew up in India, doesn’t even like the USA but is now working a nice corporate office job out here. She has less connection to the usa than I do and more rights than me. She did it right
Americans get brainwashed into rhetorical traps. Immigration is good (I’m not racist!) but illegal immigration is bad (broken window theory).
Birth tourism is close enough to illegal i.e., tourist visa with fraudulent intent, that it registers as a scam, but TPS is operating with permission of or as the 14th Amendment say “subject to the jurisdiction of” the US government.
Outside of dank corners of social media, most Americans still aren’t comfortable openly excluding people based on nationality, religion, or average IQ. It is socially more acceptable to use intent, legality, or public charge as a facade to proxy for undesirable identity traits.
This is also true. We are kind of soft when it comes to it. If we weren’t, then we might even have admissions tests or like boxing matches to identify and import the best talent from other countries. But we don’t. We prefer to let it all happen in other countries, in the sense of them playing their own games. e.g. if Iranian being the top 1% in the national entrance exams, going to the best university, then making a dash for the USA.
If not for those Honduran immigrants, anchor babies, and birth tourism scams, then who would be housing for Americans and who would save Social Security???