Lux Lucet

Last week I happened across a report about a woman by the name of Dongyuan Li, a Chinese national, who “pleaded guilty…to federal criminal charges for running an Orange County-based ‘birth tourism’ business that catered to wealthy pregnant clients and Chinese government officials, charging them tens of thousands of dollars to help them give birth in the United States so  their children would get U.S. citizenship.”  You can read the full article here.

Running a birth tourism business, while illegal, is certainly profitable.  According to the article, Li “charged each customer between $40,000 and $80,000” and “received $3 million in international wire transfers from China in two years.”  The piece goes on to note that “As part of her plea agreement, Li agreed to forfeit more than $850,000, a Murrieta residence worth more than $500,000, as well as several Mercedes-Benz vehicles.”

One further point to note about the Li case is that her company, You Win USA Vacation Services Corp., advertised to potential clients in China that it had helped “more than 500 Chinese birth tourism customers seeking U.S. birthright citizenship for their children.” As part of the scam, some of these You Win customers “made false statements on their visa applications and to U.S. immigration officials” and “were advised on how to pass the U.S. Consulate interview in China.”  Li also steered her clients to land first in Hawaii, on the grounds that she believed it would be easier for them to pass U.S. Customs there an in LA.  Another perk of being a You Win client was advice to the women on how to conceal their pregnancies to trick U.S. Customs officials.

Worth mentioning in all this is that Li’s birth tourism company is just a small drop in the ocean of the birth tourism business.  According to a 2015 Center for Immigration Studies article, it was estimated that there about 36,000 birth tourism births in the U.S. in the 12 months prior to July 1, 2012.

The birth tourism numbers – by birth tourism, I mean incidences of mothers coming from overseas to give birth in the U.S. – are themselves just a small part of the larger problem of birthright citizenship granted by the U.S. to the children born in America to foreign parents.  According to a Pew Research study from 2015, it was estimated that there were 295,000 births to illegal immigrant parents in the U.S.

According to an article in the New York Times, it is said that illegal immigrants have given birth to four million children in the U.S., sometimes referred to as anchor babies, all of whom are American citizens.  To put this number in perspective, there are only about 4 million births in the U.S. every year.

Finally, there is the cost of all this.  According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “the cost to taxpayers for births to immigrants (legal and illegal) is roughly $5.3 billion – $2.4 billion of which is for illegal immigrants.”

As an American, I read such stories with no little anger and frustration.  Anger, at the gross disrespect for my country and its laws shown by the people engaged in birth tourism as well as the illegal immigrants who impose their costs on the American people with no apparent concern.  Frustration at government officials, who, not only show little interest in addressing the source of the problem, but actually seem to work to prevent any real solution from being put in place.

In fact, I’m tempted to go further.  In my opinion, ending birthright citizenship for the children of non-U.S. citizens is the single most important action the federal government can take to begin addressing the immigration problem in the U.S.  Ending the absurd practice of giving out citizenship to the children of anyone who happens to give birth on U.S. soil is more important, and by a wide margin, than building a southern border wall, an activity that has been the main focus of the Trump administration’s attempts to slow illegal immigration into this country.  It’s more important than cutting down on the number of refugees taken in at taxpayer expense.  It’s even more important than sending home those on Temporary Protected Status who have been in the country “temporarily” for twenty years.

In a recent interview, columnist Michelle Malkin noted that providing birthright American citizenship for the children of illegal aliens is the “ultimate magnet” drawing illegals to the U.S. Said Malkin,

“Birthright citizenship for illegal aliens is the ultimate magnet … and again, that is why you’ve got pregnant women — not just from Mexico and Central America but from around the world — traveling here dangerously when they are eight months … pregnant.

We have seen local stories coming out of (sic) not only out of the southwest border, but for example through airports of entry in Florida or along both coasts where people know that’s their golden ticket.

My father, who was a legal immigrant to this country and a naturalized American, was a neonatologist in Atlantic City, and he would come home with stories about people from Africa, Korea, and Russia whose sole goal was to give birth in this country and then sit back and watch all the benefits flow. This is not how a sovereign country should run its immigration system.”

So here we have this massive problem of birth tourism and illegal immigration being driven by the desire of parents to give birth to an American citizen baby and to receive all the benefits that come with it.  Somebody help!  Is there any solution to this mess?

Yes, there is.  And it’s a very simple solution.  Put an end to birthright citizenship for the children of non-U.S. citizens born on American soil.

Of course, as soon as you suggest such a thing, out pop the trolls waiving their copies of the Constitution and in the most unctuous terms lecturing you on the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship for all children born on American soil.  Further, they usually tell you that you’re a very, very bad person for even bringing up the subject.

Former Trump administration office Michael Anton found out how nasty things can get, when, in the summer of 2018, the Washington Post (mirabile dictu!) carried his opinion piece titled “Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright.”  It’s quite a good piece and I highly recommend it, despite the rather long disclaimer the Post felt it needed to insert at the top.

But even though he argued his point well, this did not get Anton off the hook.  He was set upon by the usual liberal trolls who openly called his argument, wait for it…racist!  In light of the fact that Anton’s post said nothing about race, this seems like a strange argument indeed.  But then, we live in a time when for some on the left everything is racist if they disagree with it.

In a response to his critics, Anton made the observation that, on the one hand he was not surprised by the vehemence of his critics, but, on the other hand, was shocked to find out that so many conservatives were “just as hysterical as the Left, and [used] precisely the same terms” to describe him and his argument, terms such as xenophobe, bigot, racist, white nationalist, and white supremacist.  Said Anton, “One point I’ve been making for a while is that one faction of ‘conservatism’ – let’s call it the anti-Trump wing, although the phenomenon long predates Trump – sounds and acts with every passing year more like a ‘conservative’ subdivision of the Left.  Like the Left, they don’t want to debate; they want to call those they disagree with evil.  For what are those epithets supposed to mean, if not ‘evil’?”

This raises the question, why are conservatives so bad on the issue of birthright citizenship and, for that matter, other issues as well?  Why is it that conservatives year by year fail to conserve any of the things they claim they want to conserve?  The short answer is that conservatives do not base their arguments on the Scriptures.  In fact, much of what is taught by conservative theorists and pundits is not only not Christian, but anti-Christian.  For more on this, see John Robbins’ exceptional exposé of the conservative movement in America, “Conservatism:  An Autopsy.”

The proper place to find the answer to the issue of birthright citizenship is in the 66 books of the Bible.  It is to them, not to the conservative theorists, to which we must turn to answer the question, from where does one obtain his citizenship?

So how does the Bible answer this question?  The short answer is this:  One gets his citizenship in one of two ways, either by birth (in the event at least one parent is a citizen of the nation in question) or by taking an oath of citizenship.

Now before I flesh this out, let me warn my readers that I’m going to argue as a Presbyterian, as one who believes in covenant baptism.  Perhaps you’re a Baptist and hold to believer’s baptism.  If so, all I ask is that you consider what I have to say…or at least try to refrain from throwing rotten fruit at me!

At any rate, I’d like to turn to the Westminster Standards, the best summary of the Bible to date, to address the citizenship issue.  In Presbyterian thought, the visible church “consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children” (Westminster Confession of Faith, 25.2). This Christian, Presbyterian definition of the visible church, I argue, can be applied on a national level.  Applying the Presbyterian definition of the visible church to on the national level gives us this definition of nation:  all adults who are citizens together with their children.

So why do I say that the Presbyterian definition of the visible church can also be used to define the term “nation”?  Because both national government and church government have the same source, namely, the Lord.  The principles that apply in one also apply in the other, including the ways in which someone become a citizen, or member, of each type of organization.

The same is true in the other form of government established by God, the family.  One becomes a member of a family in the same two ways one becomes a member of the visible church or a citizen of a nation, by birth or by oath.  A man and woman are joined together by voluntary oath to become husband and wife, and the children born to them are automatically considered as part of the family.  Adopted children become family members by oath.

Question 166 of the Westminster Larger Catechism is also helpful in establishing both the definition of the church and that of a nation.  The question reads, “Unto whom is baptism to be administered?”  The answer is, “Baptism is not to be administered to any that are out of the visible church, and so strangers to the covenant of promise, till they profess their faith in Christ, and obedience to him, but infants descending from parents, either both, or but one of them, professing faith in Christ, and obedience to him, are in that respect within the covenant, and to be baptized.”

Here we see the two ways in which one becomes a member of the visible church:  Credible profession of faith in Christ for adults and by baptism of infants who have at least one believing parent.

In like fashion, I assert that there are two lawful ways in which one can become an American citizen:  For children, by virtue of having at least one parent who’s an American citizen; for adults, by taking an oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.  With the necessary changes, the same holds true for obtaining citizenship in any other nation.

A further consideration here is that Credobaptists already accept the Presbyterian view of “citizenship” in two of the three types of God-ordained government.  No Credobaptist would ever say of his newborn infant that he could not be part of the family until he was old enough to decide to join the family.  No Credobaptist would ever say of his newborn that he could not be an American citizen until he was old enough to swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution.  I would even go one step further.  My guess is that Credobaptists would be offended if one were to tell them their children could not officially be part of their families, or be considered American citizens, until they children were old enough to decide the matter for themselves.

My argument, then, is that Credobaptists are being inconsistent.  On one hand, they accept, in effect, the principle of covenant baptism with respect to their children’s’ membership in their families and citizenship in their home countries but, on the other hand, they reject it with respect to their children’s membership in the church.

Closing Thoughts

My aim in this post was to make the Christian case for eliminating the current disastrous practice of granting birthright citizenship to the children of non-American citizens born on U.S. soil.  Birthright citizenship as currently practiced makes a joke of American citizenship, creates large scale social and economic problems for America, and, most importantly, cannot be defended from the Bible.  Further, the key to solving the problem of birthright citizenship is applying the same principles of membership in the visible church, as set forth in Scripture and summarized in the Westminster Standards, to the matter of national citizenship.

Although I have not attempted to argue the point in this post, I believe that the current practice of birthright citizenship is inconsistent with our Constitution as well.

While it would be a mistake to think fixing the birthright citizenship loophole would by itself solve all of America’s immigration problems, there is, in my estimation, no other single action that would do more to move America in the right direction on this crucial issue.