“Birth tourism” — where pregnant women have their child on America soil to become citizens — has been happening for decades. But Chinese elites have “weaponized” the practice, says author Peter Schweizer, raising a generation of legal citizens who have no loyalty to the US. In this excerpt from his new book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” he explains how.
As we sang “Auld Lang Syne” in the early morning of Jan. 1, 2025, the first American newborn of the year arrived to much fanfare and celebration.
But this time, the baby was the progeny of Chinese citizens, and the mother had intentionally traveled to give birth on American soil, so that the child would automatically be granted US citizenship, a practice known as birth tourism. When such children turn 21, they can also apply for resident status for both of their parents.
This baby was born in the US territory of Saipan in the Pacific. More than 70% of the newborns in Saipan are Chinese birth tourist parents who utilize the territory’s 45-day visa-free visitation rules and the “Covenant of the Northern Mariana Islands” to guarantee that their children will have American citizenship.
That little child’s parents are two of many who are taking advantage of America’s birthright citizenship policies, based on an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. How many is anyone’s guess.
Since the US government does not directly track birth tourism, we must rely on estimates. In 2012, one nonprofit calculated that about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the United States and then left the country.
But the number is likely to be far, far higher. Chinese officials estimate that the number is a staggering 50,000 of their own citizens per year. Scholars who have studied the subject in depth, like Australia-based professor Salvator Babones, put the figure even higher, perhaps twice that.
“With up to 100,000 Chinese babies being born US citizens every year,” he writes, “birth tourism may result in millions of new elite Chinese-Americans.”
Chinese birth tourism in the United States has been practiced for decades, but it has especially flourished in the past 15 years.
That means at least 750,000 and possibly as many as 1.5 million Chinese, who are also American citizens by virtue of being born here, are now growing toward adulthood in China.
Brood awakening
These babies are often the children of elites who have prospered in the Communist Chinese system. They have been suitably indoctrinated in Chinese Communist Party-controlled schools and taught about US values, culture, or history, from a distorted CCP perspective.
Yet as citizens, they are eligible to vote in US elections and can relocate to the United States at any time.
Based on what little data we have about Chinese-to-US birth tourism, this tidal wave could hit American society beginning in 2030, when the first baby wave reaches 18 years old.
We might call them the Manchurian Generation, but it’s a story stranger and more lethal than fiction.
Another even more Byzantine and suspicious form of birthright citizenship is the widespread use of surrogate mothers in the US to carry the children of CCP officials. These officials then collect the children at birth and raise them back in China.
One such senior Chinese Communist Party official lives in a fortress-like mansion in Southern California. When not carrying out his predictable duties as a senior official for several CCP “united front groups” in California designed to advance the interests of communism in the United States, he is helping to breed dozens of children in the United States.
Guojun Xuan is a slender, 65-year-old Chinese businessman who has purchased more than $100 million in California real estate. Back in China, he has served for decades as a deputy of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional People’s Congress, a branch of the Chinese government’s National People’s Congress.
In the United States, he serves in senior leadership positions of several organizations controlled by the CCP and Chinese intelligence services called the United Front Work Department, including the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, where he serves on the executive committee.
Xuan has another interest: producing children via surrogacy with women across the US.
In May 2025, when a 2-month-old infant under his care was hospitalized with head injuries, officials found 15 children living in his $4.1 million Arcadia, Calif., mansion, ranging in age from 2 months to 13 years.
In total, they found 21 children connected to the CCP member.
Xuan arranged the births of his children through mothers spread throughout the United States. The contracts were made through his Mark Surrogacy Investment LLC, which served as a multistate embryo pipeline.
Surrogates often were unaware that others were carrying children for the same couple at the same time. Neighbors saw pregnant women coming and going from the house, which seemed to operate more like a surrogacy command center than a traditional home.
Xuan is listed as the owner of dozens of companies in California, most of them either investment or real estate firms. He has purchased more than 150 properties in Southern California worth more than $105 million.
He is not alone in his surrogacy baby mill.
Records in California indicate there are 107 companies with the word surrogacy in the name in the state, all owned by Chinese individuals.
No one in the Irvine, Calif., neighborhood noticed anything unusual until one day a forklift delivered “a huge pile of diapers” to a nondescript apartment building.
Read the full op-ed over at The New York Post:
How China supercharged ‘birth tourism’ and scammed American citizenship for up to 1.5 million babies https://t.co/VVlzX2UZaG pic.twitter.com/1X6KTQlLe0
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) January 29, 2026
