Birth Tourism Should be an Issue this Election

While contentious issues like illegal border-crossings, refugee resettlement, and annual visa allotments look to be pivotal this election year, another immigration issue, birth tourism, has strangely failed to register for candidates or party leaders.

Earlier this month, new figures showed pregnancies from tourists in Canadian hospitals going up this year by 13 percent across the country—16 percent in the case of the Greater Toronto Area. It barely made a blip in the news cycle, however, and went almost unnoticed on the campaign trail. Considering Canadians across the spectrum have long wanted the practice stopped, the lack of attention to this issue is certainly palpable.

Due to Canada’s decades-old policy of birthright citizenship, by delivering a child on Canadian soil that child becomes entitled to a Canadian passport, irrespective of the mother’s status—e.g. as a tourist, a guest worker, or even an unlawful foreign national (with one slim exception being children born to foreign diplomats. Once the “anchor baby”, as the infants are derogatorily known, reaches 18, he or she can then initiate a chain of migration; sponsoring-in the mother as well as a large number of other immediate and extended family members.

Birth tourism’s getting bigger in Canada (especially in B.C. and Ontario); so much so, even the New York Times devoted an in-depth report about it. As they noted, a whopping 20 percent of all births at the main hospital in Richmond, B.C. now go to foreign residents (mostly from mainland China). They estimated that tens of thousands of “passport babies” (as they’re also known) were born here over the last decade, many with the help of so-called “baby houses” operating in the region. These operations, according to the report, charge fees of up to $25,000 per birth; a sign that payers clearly see such a “service” as an important and long-term investment. After all, Canadian citizenship’s highly coveted. On top of future sponsorship-rights and visa-free entry into Canada and many other countries, the children (and eventually their relatives) get automatic access to Canada’s high-quality social services, including first-rate schooling and medical care.

In describing her experience in the US to the New York Times (the only other developed country to allow the practice), a Korean birth-tourist stated “[i]f they could afford it, all my friends would go to the United States to have their babies.” The same can be said for Canada. Given the ease of international travel today, and surveys showing millions of people abroad would move to Canada if they could, without political intervention, there’s little reason to see this industry contracting.

Instructively, one woman operating a baby house in the US told another interviewer that she doesn’t “encourage moms to break the law—just to take advantage of it.” She’s certainly correct; it’s a completely legal practice in the US as it is here. But unlike the US, where a change in the law would require an always-difficult constitutional amendment, here, all that’s needed is an act of Parliament. All the more infuriating then that elected Liberals, Conservatives, etc. haven’t made a serious attempt in pushing for a legislative fix of the practice.

Several parts of the world, such as the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, once followed the practice, but don’t any longer. In Hong Kong, for instance, due to its post-handover constitution giving mainland Chinese babies born in the semi-autonomous region the automatic right to claim permanent residency, hospitals there became inundated with pregnant women coming over the Chinese border; women who could have easily given birth in the mainland, but chose not to. And just like in the most affected areas of B.C. currently, rental housing around well-known hospitals in Hong Kong became filled with mainland women in the late stages of pregnancy. When expectant local mothers, however, found themselves being turned away from filled-up maternity wards, they, along with frustrated local doctors and nurses, took to the streets and protested, eventually forcing the government to end the practice.

People here appear to be just as frustrated. According to polling done earlier this year, over 80 percent of B.C. respondents (of all ethnicities) called birth tourism an “unfair” way to gain access to the province’s education and health care systems and social programs. Nearly 70 percent said it “degraded” the value of our nation’s citizenship and close to 65 percent said it displaces local mothers from our hospitals.

Several court cases in the US, at least, illustrate another serious problem related to the issue: those with no connection to the country, and even wishing it ill will, being able to obtain citizenship. Among such cases are Saudi national Yaser Hamdi, an enemy-combatant who sued the US government to obtain release from Guantanamo Bay based on his birth in Louisiana while his father was there on a work-visa in the 1970s.

There’s also the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni who was able to move to the US and counsel numerous convicted terrorists there, including some of the 9/11 attackers and Fort Hood-shooter Nidal Hassan, because he had been born in New Mexico while his father was a foreign student in that state.

There’s also the ongoing case of Alabama-born Yemeni-national Hoda Muthana; a former ‘ISIS bride’ now suing the US government for the right, based on her claimed-birthright-citizenship status, to come to the US following her detention in Syria.

Among the few recent instances this issue has been addressed by the NDP and the Liberal Party, the discussion has quickly devolved to unfair allegations of racism. But talk to a typical Canadian, certainly a health-care worker at any hospital in Metro Vancouver or the Greater Toronto Area, and they know birth tourism is a legitimate issue; one which seems to exploit Canadians’ generosity and insults their goodwill.

Candidates this election should take up this issue and start listening to the wide cross-section of concerned Canadians who want the practice stopped.