Choosing the nationality of your baby

Expectant Chinese mothers are getting US passports for their children by availing of ‘birth tourism’ services

WHAT CAN $1,475 (€1,140) buy you in modern China? Not a Tiffany diamond or a mini-sedan, say Robert Zhou and Daisy Chao. But for that price, they guarantee you something more lasting, with unquestioned future benefits: a US passport and citizenship for your new baby.

Zhou and Chao, a husband and wife from Taiwan who now live in Shanghai, run one of China’s oldest and most successful consultancies helping well-heeled expectant Chinese mothers travel to the United States to give birth.

The couple’s service includes connecting the expectant mothers with one of three Chinese-owned “baby care centres” in California. For the basic fee, Zhou and Chao will arrange for a three-month stay in a centre – two months before the birth and a month after. A room with cable TV and a wireless internet connection, plus three meals, starts at $35 (€27) a day. The doctors and staff all speak Chinese.

At a time when China is prospering and the common perception of America there is of an empire in economic decline, the proliferation of US baby services shows that for many Chinese, a US passport nevertheless remains a powerful lure. America is widely seen as more of a meritocracy than China, where getting into a good university or landing a high-paying job often depends on personal connections.

“They believe that with US citizenship, their children can have a more fair competitive environment,” Zhou says.

There are no solid figures, but dozens of firms advertise “birth tourism” packages online, many of them based in Shanghai, and Zhao says the number has soared in the past five years.

Zhou and Chao insist that everything they do is legal, noting that the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution says anyone born on US soil has the right to citizenship.

“We don’t encourage moms to break the law – just to take advantage of it,” Zhou says.

US officials confirm that it is not a crime to travel to America to give birth so that the child can have US citizenship. “You don’t deny someone because you know they’re going to the US to have children,” says a US Embassy spokesman in Beijing.

He compares the baby consultancies to services that help foreign students apply for American universities. “If you have the money, they give you the service. They tell you how to prepare your dossier. I’m sure people in Congress would call it a loophole.”

Zhou and Chao say they have helped between 500 and 600 mothers give birth to American babies in the five years they have been in business. They started with themselves, when Chao went to the US to give birth to her daughter Fiona, now aged four.

Now their clients include Chinese doctors, lawyers, business leaders, government officials and well-known media personalities. Most say they do not intend to live in the US themselves.

The reasons they want US passports for their babies are varied, but most come down to two key factors – education and setting.

“The mainland moms believe the US has better educational resources,” Zhou says. This year, 10 million students are battling for 6.6 million spots at Chinese universities and the chance for a better life. “The competition is too fierce,” Zhou says.

Education was one thing Christina Chuo had in mind when, late in her pregnancy, she and her husband decided to have their first child in the US in January and turned to Zhou and Chao for assistance.

Chuo (35) says her brother and sister both studied in the US and that “my parents paid a huge amount of money for their education” because they were foreign students.

Giving her newborn US citizenship, she says, will “provide one more choice for our baby”.

Chuo says they got their visas by saying their purpose was tourism, but she worries it will not be so easy for others.

"I am afraid in the future, with more people going to US, it will be harder to get a visa," she says. – ( Washington Post-Bloomberg service)