President Barack Obama’s administration has decided to let the surrogate birth industry sell U.S. citizenship — and access to the U.S. welfare system — to foreign parents who never even set foot in the United States.

The fertility clinics will be able to pocket the profits, after granting access to American education, health, welfare and retirement services to the foreign children and the foreign parents.

The giveaway is accomplished by a surprise change in regulations, which redefined the term “mother” to include women who contract to carry other women’s embryos to birth.

“Under this new policy, a mother who meets this definition but does not have a genetic relationship with her child (for example, she became pregnant through an egg donor) will … be able to transmit U.S. citizenship to her child, if she is a U.S. citizen and all other pertinent citizenship requirements are met,” says the announcement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The announcement, which was made along with the Department of State, is titled “USCIS Expands the Definition of ‘Mother’ and ‘Parent’ to Include Gestational Mothers Using Assisted Reproductive Technology.”

The change means that a woman who is a U.S. citizen can be hired by a reproductive medical clinic to become pregnant overseas and to give birth in China, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else, and then effectively hand a U.S. passport to the baby.

That’s a huge benefit to the child, because it makes him or her a U.S citizen, even if he or she never breathes American air, or lives among Americans, knows English or shares any American cultural norms or ideas with their natural-born American citizens.

It is also a huge benefit for the parents, because they too can get citizenship once their child becomes an adult. That citizenship allows them — and their other children — to move to the United States in time for them to access Obamacare or Medicare benefits in their retirement.

That’s also a huge benefit to the companies that broker the birth contracts. They can now raise their prices to overseas customers because they can deliver U.S. citizenship with the baby, no matter where the parents are living or where the child is born.

A 2013 Reuters story described how some wealthy Chinese were willing to pay surrogate agencies $120,000 for American women to give birth to their children in the United States, as a way of seeking U.S. citizenship for those children.

But the citizenship-selling decision leaves Americans to pay for the cost of educating foreign children, and for supporting foreign parents.

It also adds to the growing cultural diversity that studies show makes it more difficult for Americans to cooperate in communities, to maintain civil society or to influence their distant government in Washington, D.C.

The federal government is currently selling U.S. citizenship for the bargain price of roughly $500,000 under a so-called EB-5 investment visa.

The U.S. government also awards citizenship to nearly all children born inside the United States, including the children of tourists and illegal immigrants.

That generous policy has already prompted the creation of a new industry that cares for foreign mothers who fly into California and other states shortly before the U.S. birth of their foreign children.

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