Up to 36,000 babies a year are born in America to foreigners who want their children to have US citizenship, study claims

Up to 36,000 babies a year are born in America to foreign tourists who want their children to have US citizenship, researchers claim.

The Center For Immigration Studies, based in Washington DC, produced the estimated figure - but highlighted the difficulty in finding data relating specifically to 'birth tourism'.

Drawing on data from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the report says that 896,363 women who said they were born outside the US gave birth in the country in 2012.

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Up to 36,000 babies a year are born in America to foreign tourists who want their children to have US citizenship, a study has revealed (file picture)

The author of the report, Steven Camarota, added: ‘If only two or three per cent of these births were to women who are engaging in birth tourism, that would be 18,000 to 27,000 births annually.

‘While this number would be less than one per cent of the roughly four million annual births in the United States, the aggregate number of birth tourists babies would still be large, especially [considering] the cumulative effect over a number of years.’

Gamarota also drew on figures from other official surveys that gave figures for the number of foreign-born mothers in the US annually, and was able to extrapolate that the true figure could be as high as 36,000 annually. 

He also considered the number of mothers giving overseas addresses when filling out their birth certificate paperwork.

He said that 7,955 women were in that category in 2012 – but claimed there was ‘anecdotal evidence’ that mothers sometimes gave the address where they were staying temporarily in the US rather than stating where they live.

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The study highlighted the difficulty in gathering data relating specifically to 'birth tourism' (file picture)

‘Unfortunately we simply do not know what share of birth tourist mothers provide a US address vs. their overseas address,’ he wrote.

‘Further, some share of those providing an overseas address are US citizens returning home to have their child on US soil and are therefore not birth tourists. 

'All of this dramatically reduces the usefulness of the addresses provided with the birth certificate.’

He arrived at the 36,000 figure after comparing the CDC figures with data gathered by the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey (ACS).

By establishing that, in 2012, the two separate surveys - which were done six months apart - showed a fall of 36,000 births to foreign-born mothers, he concluded that the difference could be explained by 'birth tourists' leaving the country once they'd had their baby.

Camarota explains: ‘The [CDC] survey is designed to reflect the US population as of July 1 of the year the survey was taken, so the survey is recording the number of women living in the country at mid-year who had a child in last half of the prior year and the first half of the year of the survey.

‘In the second half of 2011 and the first half of 2012, the CDC reports 898,975 births to foreign-born mothers.’

Camarota says the 2012 ACS shows there were 863,407 foreign-born women who indicated that they had a child in the prior 12 months.

He added: ‘The difference between these two numbers is 35,568 and implies that about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the United States in the 12 months before July 1, 2012, but were no longer in the country.’

He added that the numbers were only an estimate based on the ‘very limited data available’, and noted the difficulty in producing a precise figure for the number of people visiting the US specifically to have their children.