U.S. President Donald Trump signed two executive orders today that the White House said expands the definition of people who are ineligible for birthright citizenship and bans “birth tourism”, Reuters reported.
Limiting birthright citizenship has been one of the top priorities in the Republican president’s crackdown on immigration.
An earlier effort by Trump was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, prompting him to call upon Congress to act.
No U.S. law outright bars birth tourism, but a federal regulation implemented in 2020 during Trump’s first term prohibits using temporary tourist and business visas for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a newborn. People who engage in birth tourism schemes could be prosecuted for fraud or other related crimes.
There are no official figures tallying the number of foreigners who come to the U.S. for the explicit purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for their children, or the cost to taxpayers.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower levels of immigration, estimated in an analysis in 2020 that between 20,000-25,000 mothers came to the U.S. for birth tourism in a year-long period between 2016-2017, Reuters reported.
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