This article was was written by Howard W. Foster and originally posted by The National Interest

The Chicago Department of Public Health, like its counterparts in all major cities, is quite open about the availability of taxpayer-funded care for pregnant women who are in the country illegally. Hospitals cannot ask about a patient’s immigration status, or even for a social security number. Pregnant women are eligible for Medicaid, the State of Illinois will not report their presence to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and best of all, their newborn children are considered American citizens. For poor pregnant women from most of the world, this is like winning the lottery. For the children, birthright citizenship means a lifetime of publicly funded benefits, and at age eighteen, the right to sponsor their parents for lawful permanent residency.

It is estimated that up to 400,000 babies are born in this country each year to mothers here illegally. In some Texas hospitals, they account for 70 percent of births. This is the “birth tourism” industry–the result of our peculiar policy of “birthright citizenship.” Anyone born on U.S. soil (or abroad, if to parents who are citizens) is a citizen, regardless of the legal statuses of their parents. Many other countries have abandoned it, including the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia. The most bizarre aspect of this law is that Congress has never passed it, and the country was never allowed to weigh in on the issue. It has simply evolved from an 1898 Supreme Court decision (U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark) concerning a lawful permanent resident. To this day, there has never been a statute or court decision providing for birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants, and here I hope to show we can and should pass a law to end it.