Show Notes
“Birth Tourism” is a major national security threat, with as many as 1.5 million Chinese children who were born as “birthright” US citizens potentially becoming voters in US elections, author Peter Schweizer told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.
Sitting on a panel with three constitutional lawyers and a US Marine, Schweizer told senators that China has created an “industrial scale” way of creating American citizens who are born in the US and quickly whisked back to China where they are raised and indoctrinated in the Chinese Communist Party’s ways. He cited Chinese government and academic estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 Chinese have been on US soil since 2013, meaning they are only a few years away from being old enough to vote.
Schweizer’s latest book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers use Immigration as a Weapon, has stayed on the New York Times bestseller list by exposing this industry among many other findings about how China and other nations are weaponizing the American tradition of birthright citizenship. On the most recent episode of The DrillDown, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers do a post-game analysis of what it was like to testify to the Senate, what went on in the room, and how it all went.
“Someone told me the hearing room is ‘historic,’” Schweizer said. “I thought they were referring to some old event, but they really meant that this was the room where Sen. John Kennedy took down Kristi Noem a week ago,” he tells Eggers. Noem was replaced as Homeland Secretary after Kennedy’s sharp questioning of her spending $220 million on an ad campaign prominently featuring her.
“It was interesting which senators were there, and which ones weren’t,” Schweizer added. GAI investigations have exposed corruption by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and more recently of the home mortgage deduction claimed by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), neither of whom participated in the hearing. Nor was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who was recently exposed for insider stock trading, an issue GAI has covered extensively.
The hearing, chaired by Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), was to consider how to rein in the kind of “birth tourism” Schweizer wrote about. But the underlying issue, brought to a head by President Trump’s executive order that federal law be read as denying birthright American citizenship to children born in cases where that person’s mother was unlawfully in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time, or when that person’s mother was in the US temporarily and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time.
That order is the subject of a US Supreme Court case that will be decided likely within the next month.
Schweizer told senators his research had found more than 1,000 companies in China that advertise birth tourism services there. The Invisible Coup documents 107 surrogacy companies in Southern California alone that work with members of the Chinese elite to have children born in the US to American mothers, sometimes through Chinese donor sperm and sometimes also with Chinese fertilized eggs.
Schweizer found it interesting that committee Democrats kept bringing up the overturned Dred Scott decision. “That is the conversation they want to have,” he says, “because I think they realize the issue (of birth tourism) is a loser for them.”
“The challenge [for the Democrats] is that if you believe that birthright citizenship is absolute — that it applies to everyone — you have to own birth tourism too, because people are going to find ways to get into the country to do this,” Schweizer says. “if you say anybody who touches a toe on US soil gets automatic US citizenship, you allow these kinds of industries to flourish.”
Schweizer noted that a whistleblower from Border Patrol has testified that during the Obama administration, border agents were told by administration appointees not to ask questions of visibly pregnant Chinese women coming into the US on tourist or other temporary visas.
Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked Schweizer whether the Trump administration had prosecuted anyone for doing this, demanding the author provide numbers of prosecutions.
“He was insistent on me giving him [Trump-era] numbers,” Schweizer says. “I don’t have the numbers. I don’t even know if those numbers are publicly available.”
Eggers says he most enjoyed a statement from one witness called by the Democrats, law professor Amanda Frost from the U. of Virginia. Frost claimed that asking for proof of parental citizenship at the time a baby is born, as Trump’s executive order implies, would result in some Americans having to trace their lineage “all the way back to the Mayflower.”
But Eggers’s favorite moment of all was not at the hearing, but on a C-SPAN call-in show Schweizer did before the hearing. He plays a clip of one of C-SPAN’s callers pontificating on the biblical prophecy of Ezekiel 38, referencing Magog and the land of Gog to make a parallel to weaponized immigration.
“Hebrew prophecy… generational sodomy… demon worshipers…. not words you expect to hear on C-SPAN on a Wednesday morning,” Eggers quipped.
“That was not in my notes for what to expect,” Schweizer tells Eggers.
On the air, though, eyes darting around while the questioner rambled, he answered by flipping the caller’s question to the history of nations trying to use immigration as a force against other nations and ended it with the book’s example of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, when more than 200,000 Cubans came to the US in boats.
“Schweizer made a world-class pivot!” a delighted Eggers says. “We are all very proud.”
“Well, we’re all excited at GAI because the book is getting a lot of official attention in Washington, DC. We briefed the president on it, there are ongoing conversations with people in the executive branch, and certainly there is movement on Capitol Hill, including these hearings,” he says.
“I think what it shows is the work that we do makes a difference. It’s not just about drawing attention to problems or getting people excited about a book. Our entire goal is to use the book and the research as a foundation upon which we can build a house. And that house is built to lead to government change.”
