Birthright citizenship

I'm going to make an unpopular confession: I love birthright citizenship. Yes, I've heard the stories that America just adopted it to get around the Dred Scott ruling, which held that black people could not be citizens of the US. I don't know if that's true. But I still love the idea: a child born in America is automatically a citizen of America. This prevents us from having a permanent class of "guest workers", the way they do in Europe and the Middle East.

I'm also not bothered by the fact that some women from other countries, ranging from the Latin American countries to China, visit the U.S. just to give birth. For all of the discussion of "anchor babies" that you hear, you'd think that having a child born in the U.S. confers an automatic right to stay to the parents. But it does not, as anyone who actually cared (a group apparently not including either President Trump or President Obama) would know. It seems to me that the bigger problem isn't the child being born here and having the option to come here at 18, but rather the lack of attention paid to visa-overstayers and other U.S. residents who do not have legal residency in the U.S. (and generally aren't even trying to get it).

I'm bringing up this point for two reasons: 1) there is a movement to eliminate birthright citizenship, which seems un-American to me (and hopefully continues to fail to gain more traction); and 2) Chinese citizens have found a new way to gain birthright citizenship for their newborn babies, by visiting the resort of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands. A Wall St. Journal article today (Dec. 22, 2017) discusses this trend, because Chinese citizens can go to Saipan (a gambling haven, which generates 70+% of its income from tourism) without a visa, and as the Northern Mariana Islands are a U.S. territory, babies born there acquire U.S. birthright citizenship. Births to Chinese citizens in Saipan have grown from 8 in 2009 to 472 in 2016.

Obviously, the U.S. couldn't accommodate all of China. But 500 babies -- or even 1,500 babies -- is a far cry from "all of China". And these tourists can actually afford to pay for the birth, unlike the Americans who would like to switch to socialized medicine, paid for by the government. As I learned from numerous friends in Canada, including doctors, the customer service value of the healthcare service you get in Canada equals the amount you paid for it. There just isn't any incentive to do more than the bare minimum. And I still think it's great that so many people from the rest of the world want their children to have the chance to come here to live.

Maybe we could let the parents of these babies stay in the U.S. by trading them for some of the malcontents currently in the U.S.?