After the US Department of Homeland Security arrested the illegal alien parents of Ann Mary Zheng and Alen Zheng – two siblings tied to the attempted attack on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida – Peter Schweizer commented on the growing problem.
“This is becoming a pattern, when people that have nefarious intent to the United States are US citizens,” Schweizer told Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany. The two siblings are the children of two Chinese immigrants who came to the US in 1993 on an asylum claim. Although their claim was formally denied in 1998, the parents stayed illegally in the US, Schweizer explains, and their two US-born children are birthright American citizens.
As Schweizer explains, this is not an unusual example. Anwar al Awlaki, a top al Qaeda recruiter who lived in Yemen and was killed in a drone strike ordered by then-President Barack Obama, was also a birthright US citizen by virtue of his Yemeni parents having been in New Mexico on student visas at the time he was born. Obama was sharply criticized at the time for “droning a US citizen” when he ordered the US military to fire on his base in Yemen.
“You look at the current head of the Jalisco drug cartel, who is a US citizen because he was a beneficiary of birthright citizenship,” Schweizer said. “You look at the [Sinaloa] drug cartel, El Chapo, who headed that criminal organization. He secretly flew his wife to Los Angeles in 2012 so his twins would have US citizenship. So, this is a massive problem for terrorism and crime as well.”
“You just blew my mind. I didn’t know any of those facts,” McEnany replied.
She went on to focus on Chinese birth tourism, a Chinese industry that flies Chinese citizens to USA soil to give birth to “birthright” US citizens who are then quickly whisked back to be raised in China.
“These individuals don’t stay in the United States, go to American schools, or pledge allegiance to this flag. Some of these individuals go back to China with the CCP and have American citizen children,” she said.
“You nailed it. Kayleigh. That’s exactly the inherent problem,” said Schweizer, whose new #1 New York Times bestselling book The Invisible Coup exposes the Chinese practice in great detail.
“If you look at the birth tourism industry, they list who some of their clients are, and where they work, and they are all government officials, they’re military officers, and intelligence officers. The people doing this in China are, by and large, not political dissidents. They’re part of the Chinese elite. The Chinese Communist Party has actually encouraged this behavior. Going back to 2013, the People’s Daily, the big mouthpiece newspaper of the CCP, ran a large article explaining how to do this,” he said.
“So, the question becomes, why would a foreign adversary want masses of people to do this? Members of their elite?”
Schweizer’s book quotes Chinese statistics and other scholars suggesting that between 50,000 and possibly 150,000 Chinese babies per year have been born on American soil and returned to China immediately after birth. But he cautioned that US officials have no way to measure this.
“We don’t track this. We have no clue how many Chinese nationals or foreign nationals from Mexico, from Saudi Arabia, or from Russia are doing this because we do not track the nationality of parents on birth certificates,” Schweizer said. “So, it’s a massive national security vulnerability.”
