Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department has quietly dismantled organized “birth tourism” networks across West Africa, North Africa, and Europe, revoking hundreds of visitor visas tied to schemes that helped pregnant foreign nationals enter the United States to give birth and secure automatic citizenship for their children.
The department detailed more than 600 cases in a June 10 series of posts on X, framing the enforcement push as a defense of the “integrity of U.S. citizenship.” They are trying to maintain the integrity of U.S. citizenship.
There were 100 visa fixers in North Africa alone.
The European caseload was worse, with more than 400 suspected birth tourism cases since 2024, linking at least six companies to operations that coached applicants through consular interviews and arranged housing and delivery plans on U.S. soil.
Our citizenship shouldn’t be a commodity. It needs to be protected.
The department said it is coordinating with foreign authorities to identify parallel operations.
John Eastman of the Claremont Institute told Newsweek that the revocations show the need for Trump’s executive order to correct the 14th Amendment.
David Bier of the Cato Institute claimed birth tourism is a marginal problem and doesn’t justify jus soli (Latin for “right of the soil”) citizenship.
However, Bier forgets that China alone is responsible for at least a million anchor babies, and those are only the ones we know about. No reasonable country allows people to become citizens on this basis. We will see how the Supreme Court decides, but clearly, the 14th Amendment was not meant for anyone but Black people who were native to the country, not visitors who want to get the family into the country and take advantage of our benefits.
