“We live in a world where being an American citizen is, is a great privilege and honor,” said bestselling author and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer this week. Schweizer quoted Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote that, “you’ve got billions of people who want American citizenship, and they’re going to figure out ways to do it.”
People will lie and cheat to gain American citizenship and residency, and scams to help them do it come include “birth tourism,” fake marriages, and even falsely claiming to have been beaten up.
This week, new Attorney General Todd Blanche Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a federal indictment charging 11 people in an alleged decade-long, multimillion-dollar marriage fraud scheme. Prosecutors say the network arranged more than 1,000 sham marriages, allegedly charging Chinese nationals up to $100,000 for green-card assistance while paying U.S. citizens as much as $30,000 to participate.
Schweizer, author of the #1 bestselling book The Invisible Coup that revealed the large extent of China’s “birth tourism” activities in the US, spoke to radio hosts John Catsimatidis and Rita Cosby about the variety of ways foreigners try to stay in the US and claim American citizenship. Not only through sham marriages, but also by claiming to have been victims of crime, which can qualify someone for a special victim of criminal activity immigration status.
“There was a case just a few years ago in Philadelphia,” Schweizer told the hosts. “The scam was that they were hiring people to ‘attack’ migrants who were in on the scam, so that they could claim that they were ‘victims of a crime,’” Schweizer explained.
“Some of them said they had been raped, some of them said that they had been brutally beaten. They put that on their visa applications and got approved. Investigators later found out that it was all made up – that the people that were the ‘victims’ were paying a guy who hired people to pretend-attack them, so they could file police reports,” Schweizer said.
Schweizer’s book revealed that as many as 100,000 Chinese children per year have been born on US soil in the past 13 or so years, then whisked back to China with their parents where they are raised in the Chinese system. This practice, known as “birth tourism,” is visa fraud, and Schweizer applauds the administration of President Donald Trump for its efforts to crack down on these kinds of “hacks” to the US’s immigration laws.
“The fake marriages, the birth tourism stuff. This is the first American president who has said, ‘We are not going to tolerate this. We are going to arrest people.’ It’s visa fraud. Bringing your pregnant girlfriend or wife into the country, claiming you’re coming as a tourist — that is visa fraud,” Schweizer told Catsimatidis and Cosby. “It is a really important development.”
Schweizer underscored the differences between people who come to the US illegally, have children, and stay here for the opportunities, contrasting that with the various “hacks” such as industrial scale birth tourism encouraged openly by the Chinese government.
“We can debate whether somebody who sneaks across the border, lives here for 20 years, has a couple of kids, but plays by the rules… we can have a good debate about those children being US citizens,” he said. “But who wants to defend the practice where a mother flies in, gives birth to a child, leaves as soon as the child is able to do so, and the child never lives here?”
Cosby asked about GAI’s investigations of welfare fraud in the states, especially in California. On Schweizer’s own podcast, The DrillDown, Schweizer reported that California has 270 government staff that are supposed to investigate frauds in social welfare programs but were able to make just 32 indictments in 2024 for welfare fraud. The federal anti-fraud task force, under Vice President J.D. Vance, has already unearthed more than $1 billion worth of Medicaid-related fraud in just six months this year.
“The estimates from professionals, is that 20 percent of public assistance is fraudulent in one form or another,” Schweizer told the hosts. “There are states, especially Democratic states like New York, that are really not interested in policing this. They actually have more people employed in marketing, in publicity for these assistance programs than they do actually trying to undermine the criminal networks that are ripping us off.”
“This is a problem in ‘red states,’ too,” he told the hosts. “Alabama has seven people that investigate this stuff — seven people for the entire state. It’s a problem because politicians of both stripes see it as federal money that comes into the state,” he explained, adding that they conclude that even if there is fraud in how it is allocated, it will help their state’s economy “because there’s going to be more money to spend. That’s a mindset that has to change,” Schweizer said.
(Listen to the entire interview in the player above)
