Debates about immigration largely revolve around what happens with immigrants once they arrive in the United States. In his new book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” bestselling author Peter Schweizer argues that Americans need to start talking about who is sending immigrants to our shores and why. Backed by years of forensic fieldwork and a trove of confidential documents and intercepted communications, Schweizer details how foreign leaders, global NGOs, and even drug cartels have turned the country’s welcome mat into a source of power and profit that undermines U.S. national security.
In this excerpt from the book, Schweizer details China’s efforts to exploit birthright citizenship protections. Schweizer’s reporting on this widespread yet little noticed strategy is especially timely as the Supreme Court is set to review the tradition of extending citizenship to almost everyone born on U.S. soil (including its territories) no matter the immigration status of their parents.
By Peter Schweizer
As we sang “Auld Lang Syne” in the early morning minutes of January 1, 2025, the first American newborn of the year arrived to much fanfare and celebration, as happens every year. But this time, the baby was the progeny of Chinese citizens, and the mother had intentionally traveled to give birth on American soil, so that the child would automatically be granted US citizenship, a practice known as birth tourism. When such children turn twenty-one, they can also apply for resident status for both of their parents. This New Year’s baby was born in the US territory of Saipan in the Pacific. More than 70 percent of the newborns in Saipan are PRC birth tourist parents who utilize the territory’s forty-five-day visa-free visitation rules and the “Covenant of the Northern Mariana Islands” to guarantee that their children will have American citizenship.
That little child’s parents are two of many who are taking advantage of America’s birthright citizenship policies, based on an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. How many is anyone’s guess. Birth tourism is a massive business in China alone, but how many such births are we talking about? No one really knows, least of all the US federal government, which does not directly track birth tourism.
The rough estimates from outside organizations are startling. In 2012, one nonprofit estimated that about thirty-six thousand foreign-born women gave birth in the United States and then left the country.
But the number is likely to be far, far higher.
Chinese officials estimate that the number is a staggering fifty thousand of their own citizens per year. Scholars who have studied the subject in depth, like Australian-based professor Salvator Babones, put the figure even higher, perhaps twice that. “With up to 100,000 Chinese babies being born US citizens every year,” he writes, “birth tourism may result in millions of new elite Chinese- Americans.”
Some place the numbers higher still. Media Research, a Chinese data analysis company, says that in 2018 alone, 150,000 people came from China to the United States to practice birth tourism.
The practice of Chinese birth tourism in the United States has been practiced for decades, but it has especially flourished in the past fifteen years. That means at least 750,000 and possibly as many as 1.5 million Chinese, who are also American citizens by virtue of being born here, are now growing toward adulthood in China.
So, as millions from Mexico and the developing world stream across the border, China has methodically exploited our laws with a more sophisticated approach. Because of US birth tourism, perhaps more than a million Chinese nationals have become US citizens by virtue of being born here, but have no memories or allegiance to our country. As we will see, they are often the children of elites who have prospered in the communist Chinese system. They have been suitably indoctrinated in CCP-controlled schools and taught about US values, culture, or history, from a distorted CCP perspective. Technically, as American citizens, they are eligible to vote in US elections and can relocate to the United States at any time. When they turn twenty-one, they can sponsor their parents to come here, too, as permanent residents. Based on what little data we have about Chinese-to-US birth tourism, this tidal wave could hit American society beginning in 2030, when the first baby wave reaches eighteen years old.
We might call them the Manchurian Generation, but it’s a story stranger and more lethal than fiction.
The US federal government does not even collect this data or track the numbers—it is a guessing game in Washington. Officials in Washington have admitted for a while that birth tourism is a problem. When it first emerged as a large-scale practice during the Obama administration, the US State Department expressed the obvious national security implications. As officials told a US Senate committee, “permitting short-term visitors with no demonstrable ties to the United States to obtain visas to travel to the United States primarily to obtain US citizenship for a child creates a potential long-term vulnerability for national security.” Birth tourists “are able to help that child avoid the scrutiny, standards, and procedures that he or she would normally undergo if he or she sought to become a US citizen through naturalization.”
Yet, as we will show, the Obama administration encouraged this practice.
Especially in China, birth tourism is highly organized, supported by the Chinese Communist Party, and perhaps represents a covert method of injecting millions of “citizens” into America. Some of these parents may not favor the CCP and could be seeking an escape hatch from communist China. But many of the parents involved are pillars of the Chinese elite: CCP members, senior officials of intelligence agencies, and government ministers. The practice targets a vulnerability in US immigration law, suggesting that China’s malicious intent is civilizational warfare through subversive immigration. China has done this before elsewhere.
There is an even more insidious method of penetrating the United States through birthright citizenship.
While hundreds of thousands of pregnant Chinese women have flocked to the United States to give birth in this country so their children will be American citizens, another even more byzantine and suspicious form of birthright citizenship is the widespread use of surrogate mothers in the United States to carry the children of senior CCP officials. These officials then collect the children at birth and raise them back in China.
One such senior Chinese Communist Party official lives in a fortress-like mansion in Southern California. When not carrying out his predictable duties as a senior official for several CCP “united front groups” in California designed to advance the interests of communism in the United States, he is helping to breed dozens of children in the United States. To what end?
This excerpt from “The Invisible Coup” is reprinted courtesy of Harper books.
