Three cheers for trying to end birth tourism

President Trump has issued an executive order trying to limit or stop the practice of “birth tourism.” Many commentators, politicians and the media tend to conflate birth tourism with “birthright citizenship,” which may be understandable since Trump often rails against both practices in the same breath. But they are not the same.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment, birthright citizenship holds that those born on U.S. soil are, with certain limited exceptions, U.S. citizens whether their parents are in the country legally or not. The U.S. Supreme Court recently reaffirmed this long-held understanding.

Birth tourism, in contrast, is a premeditated effort, often by upper-middle and upper-income foreign women, to game our immigration system by coming to the U.S. through legal channels but for the undisclosed purpose of having a child on U.S. soil. Once the child is born, the women usually return to their home countries with their newly minted U.S. citizens.

There is a whole network of companies, nonprofit organizations and legal advisors who profit from helping these foreign women abuse our immigration system. That’s why Trump’s new executive order deserves three cheers.

The first cheer: The executive order exposes the practice of birth tourism as an abuse of the system. “Birth tourism operators use deceptive advertisements and inducements to entice foreign nationals to travel to the U.S. for the purpose of giving birth on American soil.”

It is not a recent phenomenon. In 2009 a health care newsletter exposed........

© The Hill