The United States Department of State (“DOS”) has released a fact sheet on establishing a new Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force (“Task Force”) that reviews nonimmigrant visa holders activities specifically to identify those who have engaged in birth tourism and to revoke visas for those who engage or facilitate in the practice.
The Task Force, which is being overseen by DOS Secretary Marco Rubio, will have a number of functions including the following:
- Review activities of nonimmigrant visa holders worldwide to identify instances of birth tourism, take action to revoke visas of those who engage in or facilitate in those acts, and dismantle the networks that profit from the activity.
- Address abuse by analyzing and connecting information and intelligence across DOS and other federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security.
- Examine birth tourism on a global scale including travel histories of individuals from around the world in order to end its exploitation.
According to the Task Force, birth tourism has become a for-profit industry with facilitators marketing the practice as doulas, midwives, or wellness advocates while advertising “birth in the U.S.” services complete with visa coaching and medical arrangements. The Task Force further notes that some facilitators have gone as far as forging medical records, coaching clients to conceal their true travel purposes, and avoid paying hospital bills complete with online marketing promises of “automatic citizenship” for their child and a “future without borders.”
The Task Force, together with DOS consular officers at U.S. Embassies and Consulates have emphasized that nonimmigrant visa applicants who willfully misrepresent the purposes of travel be found permanently ineligible for a visa or entry into the United States. Some examples of patterns that illustrate the lengths that some nonimmigrant visa applicants have gone through include the following:
- Foreign national concealing her pregnancy with her U.S. citizen partner’s child and misrepresenting herself as his domestic employee in order to be issued a B-1 Domestic Employee Visa while her true intention was to give birth in the United States.
- Foreign couple disclosed that their purpose of travel was to attend a conference and a shopping vacation as a cover to have two children born in the United States during two separate trips involving two separate nonimmigrant visa applications.
- Foreign government official applying for a nonimmigrant visa to travel on behalf of her government for one week. The official stayed in the United States for three (3) months and gave birth to her child before departing.
- Foreign national who at the time of applying for her nonimmigrant visa disclosed her purpose was to visit Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Instead, she traveled to Los Angeles where she gave birth.
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