What I couldn't say in the Monkey Cage blog piece on the pregnant women ban

It’s been awhile, but I finally wrote more public facing scholarship. This time for the Monkey Cage blog in the Washington Post, a blog written and edited by political scientists for smart laypersons. My piece which came out on January 28, 2020 was about the Trump Administration’s new instructions to State Department Officials interviewing foreigners for tourist visas that provided historical as well as international context for the move.

The Monkey Cage blog has parameters for their pieces; they do not allow opinion editorials, instead they want pieces which are explainers or ones that use social science research to shed light on a particular political issue. They also limit the pieces to about 1000 words so you can’t ramble.

I read the official new regulations for State Department personnel at overseas embassies around the world so you don’t have to. There are two things that I an others have noticed about these new regs that I could not expound upon in my WashPo piece.

The ostensible rationale for this change in policy (that also justified the bypasses of congressional approval and the traditional public comments period, is that national security is at stake) is that birth tourism could be “a source of fraud and other criminal activity, including international schemes.” Pg. 10. On pg. 8-9 of the new State Department regs, it states, “The previous regulation failed to address the national security vulneralbity that could allow foreign governments or entities to recruit, or groom U.S. citizens who are born as the reuslt of borth touristm and raised overseas, without attachment ot he United States, in manners that threaten the security of the U.S.” Scary. Is US birth on US soil with years of socialization in the US inoculation against extremist behavior? Paging the homegrown and radicalized American Talaban, Over and over the State Department regs allege that admitting pregnant tourist women to the US may be a pathway for terrorists or those wishing to do harm to the US. In addition, with no evidence, The author of the regs also says that immigrant women may be giving birth to US citizenship children to access US citizenship and social services. Elsewhere I have debunked these arguments.

Here’s what I wanted to direct your attention to which I could not in the WashPo piece.

First, no one has accurate statistics to quantify the scale of the birth tourism phenomenon. The State Department’s new regs references on pg. 7 “thousands of children are born in the United States to B-1/B-2 nonimmigratns annually.” How many “thousands” Two thousand? Seventeen thousand? The number matters and no one has a clear number.

Second, despite the multiple citations to concern “national security” and “criminal activity” “associated” with birth tourism that purportedly caused the change of rules to prevent birth tourism, there are no examples or citations to the connection between crime, terrorism, and birth tourism, save a cite to a ring of birth tourist business es cited in footnote 10 on pg. 13. No terrorist acts or other threats to national security. This lack of specificity is all the more surprising when at other pages of the same document, the author provides the specific example of the .immigrant woman who happens to be pregnant seeking entery ot hte US “ to vist her dying mother, and that during the visit she may give birth in the United Sates becuase her due date overlapped with her mother’s last expected months of life” as an allowable exception to the new birth tourism rules on (pg. 16 of the new regs). One is left wondering about the actual tie of birth tourism to terrorism and criminal activity, if any, absent of more concrete citation. Hmmm….