Show Notes
With the Supreme Court considering Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship to children born in the US to non-citizens, investigative reporter Peter Schweizer warns that America is about to face a tsunami of voters who are technically U.S. citizens but were reared and reside in Communist China.
“The integrity of our election process is under threat,” Schweizer says in the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast. Schweizer’s new bestselling book, The Invisible Coup, reports that as many as 1.5 million Chinese children were born in the past 13 years to “birth tourism” parents who gave birth on US soil then returned with their babies to China. From an elections standpoint, these “birthright” US citizens may soon be eligible to vote.
Schweizer’s research was included in a brief filed for the Supreme Court case, and Solicitor General John Sauer argued to the justices that more than 500 birth tourism companies exist in China to provide this service. Based on more recent research than Sauer relied upon, Schweizer places the figure closer to 1,000. But, as Schweizer says, the US government has no hard data on the numbers of foreigners who give birth in the US each year because birth certificates do not list the nationality of the child’s parents.
Pew Research Center recently reported a survey concluding that In 2023, mothers who were unauthorized immigrants or had legal temporary status in the U.S. had 320,000 babies, representing about 9% of all 3.6 million babies born in the U.S. that year. According to Pew, about 260,000 of those babies would not have qualified for birthright citizenship if Trump’s executive order had already been in effect.
“I haven’t found anybody on the [political] left that actually likes to talk about birth tourism because they know how bad it ,” Schweizer says. “So, this is (no pun intended) a growth industry and something that more and more Chinese citizens seem to be taking advantage of. And as the number of people participating in this practice grows, so too does the media attention on it.”
After playing a news clip about federal agents busting a Turkish birth tourism ring on Long Island, co-host Eric Eggers points out the other aspect of the scheme – birthright citizens, when they grow up, can not only vote but sponsor their foreign parents to immigrate to the US.
“If the birthright citizenship case comes back and says, ‘nobody can place any limits on this — the only way you can change this by a new constitutional amendment,’… I think that turns the Constitution into a suicide pact,” Schweizer says. “Because there’s no likelihood of them reaching the numbers they need to pass a new constitutional amendment on this issue… So, it’s going to be dead in the water.”
“And the next time you have a Democratic president, they will open up the floodgates as [President] Barack Obama did. Obama explicitly told Customs and Border Patrol that if a pregnant woman shows up in an airport coming to the United States, and says they are here on a tourism visa, do not question them about their pregnancy do not deny them admission, because they wanted birth tourism to take place,” he says.
The High Court is expected to rule on the case in late June or July.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s biggest fundraising arm, “ActBlue,” is under investigation for illegally allowing – and even obscuring — foreign donations to Democrat candidates. The organization has been found to have attributed hundreds of thousands of small contributions on its disclosures to Americans who say they never made them. Further, ActBlue was not requiring donors who use credit cards to include the CVV code for each card, which is required to prevent a thief from using someone else’s card.
GAI has reported on this scandal before. “It’s a practice known as ‘smurfing,’ but some of the data just jumps out at you,” says Eric Eggers. “Some of the contributions tagged to a location like Slidell, Louisiana, totaled over 23,000 percent of the local income in that town, or 190 percent of the local income in Stillwell, Kansas — some crazy numbers.”
ActBlue officials may have lied to Congress, and much of its senior leadership resigned in the wake of the revelations that a law firm they hired to audit their statements against what really happened found them to have testified to falsehoods in front of Congress. ActBlue “parted ways” with the law firm a week later.
The suspicion is that ActBlue masked the identities of foreign donors to evade US election law, which forbids any political contributions from foreigners in order to prevent foreign interference in American elections. Congressional investigation of ActBlue continues.
Finally, Schweizer and Eggers touch on an ongoing lawsuit by the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the League of Women Voters of Virginia challenging the state’s policy of illegally and systematically removing voters from the rolls only one month before the upcoming election. Virginia’s previous governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin, ordered state and local election officials to remove individuals from the state voter registration list if Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records do not indicate US citizenship. His administration did this after it discovered and removed more than 6,000 noncitizen registered voters from voting rolls.
