State Department Dismantles Birth Tourism Networks in Africa, Europe

The State Department is dismantling birth tourism networks across Africa and Europe, officials announced on Wednesday.

An estimated 33,000 United States-born children are rewarded birthright American citizenship annually solely because their foreign parents arrived in the United States on a temporary visa, often a tourist visa, before they were born. Decades later, those American-born children can sponsor their parents for green cards.

The birth tourism industry is widespread among Turkish nationals in New York City, Chinese nationals in California, Russian nationals in Florida, and Middle Easterners in Illinois.

State Department officials said in a series of X posts they have just recently brought down in West Africa “a sophisticated birth tourism network of more than 100 foreign nationals using fraudulent documents and visa ‘fixers’ to get themselves visas … to get U.S. citizenship for their children.”

Meanwhile, in North Africa, the agency “revoked over 100 visas for ‘birth tourist’ parents who came to the United States primarily to give birth so their children would get U.S. citizenship,” officials wrote.

In Europe, a single U.S. embassy has uncovered more than 400 suspected cases of birth tourism since 2024, leading investigators to at least six companies that coach Europeans...

... in 2019, the DOJ uncovered a birth tourism scheme among Chinese nationals across California, where some 8,500 U.S.-born children were rewarded birthright American citizenship after their foreign parents arrived in the United States on tourist visas solely to deliver their child.