Nearly 1 in 10 newborns in the U.S. in 2023 were delivered by a mother who was either here illegally or was here on a temporary visitor’s pass.
And the vast majority of those — some 260,000 — would have been denied recognition of American citizenship under President Trump’s order restricting birthright citizenship, according to the Pew Research Center, which crunched the numbers.
They were born to families where neither the mother nor father had permanent status here, meaning either citizenship or a green card.
Most of the time — some 245,000 cases — the mothers were illegal immigrants. In the other 15,000 cases, the mothers had some temporary visitor’s status.
In about 60,000 other cases, the mother lacked permanent status but the father did, meaning the child would have been eligible even under Mr. Trump’s policy.
Looking more broadly, Pew said more than 4 million babies born here from 2006 to 2023 would not have qualified for citizenship under Mr. Trump’s vision.
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The numbers highlight the stakes for the Supreme Court as the justices ponder the legality and constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s executive order, announced on Inauguration Day last year.
Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies who has done his own research on the situation, said many people tend to view illegal immigrants as either beneficial workers or detrimental criminals.
The birth numbers show the reality is more complicated, he said. They’re often part of families at the lower end of the income scale, and they end up costing tens of billions of dollars in education and welfare payments each year.
“You can’t ignore that,” he said. “That’s the reality here. If you tolerate widespread illegal immigration, you’re going to have enormous impacts on your taxpayers, your schools, your politics. Everything is going to be reshaped.”
At the same time, he said, unwinding automatic birthright citizenship could be tricky. The U.S. doesn’t have the administrative structures in place to check the status of mothers when they give birth.
That was one of the issues that arose during oral argument at the Supreme Court last month when the justices took up the case.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett said U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer’s vision relied on intent to make a home, which she said can be tough to discern.
“Are we bringing pregnant women in for depositions?” wondered Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Other nations have figured it out, though. Most of America’s peers in Europe do not practice the same level of automatic citizenship as the U.S.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule by the end of its term in June.
All told, Pew calculated 320,000 babies were born in 2023 to mothers who were here without firm permanent legal status. That works out to about 9% of the 3.6 million total births that year.
Looking at illegal immigrant mothers specifically, the total was 300,000.
That’s down from a peak of 380,000 in 2006. The numbers dipped after that year, falling to just 215,000 around the start of this decade, before climbing back up as illegal immigration surged.
Mr. Camarota said the births generally track the size of the illegal immigrant population, though with the caveat that fertility rates have fallen. That means that even though the number of illegal immigrants is at an all-time high, the rate of births to them is not.
The mothers who deliver the children encompass a wide range of experiences.
Among the illegal immigrants, the vast majority came to work or live with family. A much smaller number are illegal immigrants who came specifically to give birth. Experts say that number is difficult to pin down, though border hospital workers say it happens with some frequency.
Among the legal temporary visitors, some women are here on guest worker visas or followed spouses who are here as guest workers, and some are students. Pew said there were about 20,000 of those in 2023.
And then there are women who take part in what’s been dubbed “birth tourism,” where they will schedule a tourism visa so they can be in the U.S. to give birth — and secure American citizenship for their baby. Pew figured there were about 9,000 of those cases in 2023.
Senior Homeland Security officials have told The Washington Times that coming to the U.S. specifically for the purpose of giving birth is a legal gray area.
Pregnant women are not banned from entering with a visa, but consular officers have been instructed to deny tourism visas if they think the main reason for the travel is to earn birthright citizenship for their newborn. Likewise, border officers can use discretion to deny entry if they believe birth tourism is the primary reason for someone’s visit.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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