China’s Birthright Infiltration

Why the CCP’s abuse of unrestricted birthright citizenship is a national security nightmare.

Imagine a million-plus potential enemy infiltrators, born in the United States but raised, educated, indoctrinated, and trained in the People’s Republic of China and holding no emotional or loyalty ties to the U.S.

Because of birthright citizenship, every one of them is a natural-born U.S. citizen, holding genuine U.S. birth certificates, Social Security cards and, later, U.S. passports, driver’s licenses, voter registrations, and concealed carry permits. They will have no fear of getting tripped up over a fraudulent identity or a flawed “legend,” or backstory. These infiltrators not only can leave and return to the U.S. whenever they please, they also will go through the U.S. citizen line at Customs.

When they apply for important government, military, or defense contractor jobs requiring a background check, they will be analyzed under the somewhat more lenient standard of a natural-born U.S. citizen rather than that of a foreigner or even a naturalized citizen. In fact, owing to their Chinese upbringing, they will be more likely to be hired because of their fluency in Mandarin.

These million enemy infiltrators are, in short, China’s perfect spies, saboteurs, and double agents, and their ranks are growing all the time. The Chinese Communist Party actively exploits American birthright citizenship to cultivate a spy network straight from a Tom Clancy novel.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the birthright citizenship case Trump v. Barbara in April, and while attention will likely focus on women from Latin America crossing our border before giving birth (the “Barbara” in this case is a Honduran citizen), the national security implications of birthright tourism present a more direct threat, and one that may be more winnable in court. This is because it carries serious national security implications of which the high court may not be fully aware, especially regarding the People’s Republic of China.

The New Espionage

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s KGB and GRU spy agencies went to great lengths to compromise U.S. intelligence. But they could only dream of the kind of access enjoyed by modern China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Joint Staff Intelligence Bureau (JSIB).

In order to infiltrate the U.S., KGB officials oversaw the so-called “illegals” program, by which Russian agents posed as ordinary U.S. citizens in order to gather intelligence while having no official role for the home government (the program later inspired the television series “The Americans,” which ran for six seasons on FX). The undercover agents engaged in espionage under false or assumed identities, gathering personal and professional information about government officials, developing sources and intelligence, and sometimes taking active measures such as spreading propaganda and intimidating or even assassinating targeted individuals.

The KGB expended considerable resources to create these illegal (i.e., non-official) operatives and their all-important cover legends. One technique was to steal or otherwise use another person’s identity, such as the name and Social Security number of a baby who died shortly after birth, in order to avoid detection.

But however clever, sneaky, skilled, ruthless, and nasty Russian intelligence agencies might be, China’s MSS and JSIB are much worse. They are more sophisticated and better funded than the KGB ever was, with more manpower and better technical capabilities. And they have been vastly more successful than the Russians at weaponizing birthright citizenship and our generous public welfare programs against us.

The CCP is well aware that babies born on U.S. soil, including the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands, are automatically U.S. citizens regardless of the mother’s circumstances. Tourist, visitor, student, employee, worker, or illegal alien, her U.S.-born child is an American citizen and, once he reaches 21 years of age, may apply for green cards for his parents. He can vote and donate money in U.S. elections even without residing in the United States. His future children can be U.S. citizens too, regardless of where they are born, because of the Child Citizenship Act.

Chinese nationals can have U.S. citizen children without having to enter any U.S. state and, since 2009, without even having to obtain a tourist visa and the vetting it entails if they give birth in Guam or the Northern Mariana Islands, as highlighted in a recent letter from Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL), Jim Banks (R-IN), and Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).

In 2014, the Obama administration made birth tourism even easier for Chinese nationals by extending the length of their student and exchange visas from one year to five, and business and tourism visas from one year to ten, thereby eliminating the need for a yearly renewal interview. In 2024, the Biden administration granted all Chinese nationals 14-day access to the Northern Mariana Islands with no visa requirement.

The number of Chinese mothers giving birth to U.S. citizen children on the island of Saipan has skyrocketed from fewer than ten per year in 2009 to approximately 600 by 2018, a 5,900% increase. More than 70% of recent Saipanese newborns were born to Chinese mothers. These babies all are U.S. citizens and, as far as we know, their mothers took them back to China to grow up and be educated, even though they are U.S.—and not Chinese—citizens, at least on paper.

Political Implications

This is important for many reasons, one of them being that the CCP prefers American political candidates who are more likely to be friendly to Chinese interests. For example, the CCP openly favored Joe Biden in the 2020 election. CEFC China Energy and its executives Patrick Ho (whom Hunter Biden dubbed “the f***ing spy chief of China”) and Ye Jianming transferred millions of dollars to Hunter and other Bidens, and Jianming gave Hunter an ultra-expensive bottle of Scotch and a diamond worth approximately $80,000. The CCP preferred Kamala Harris in the 2024 campaign as well.

In fact, the Chinese government, often through affiliates who are either U.S. citizens or green card holders, has tried to influence presidential elections in favor of the Democratic candidate since at least 1996. Vice President Al Gore and DNC chairman Don Fowler were caught illegally raising money at the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights that year. Much of the money raised at that event and others came from outright illegal or highly dubious Chinese sources.

The Chinese government also works to influence local and state elections, taking the long view that today’s city councilmen may be tomorrow’s governors, senators, cabinet secretaries, or even presidents.

In 2025, the Department of Justice charged Linda Sun and her husband Chris Hu with visa fraud, alien smuggling, money laundering conspiracy, and acting as unregistered agents for China. Sun was a top aide to Kathy Hochul during her time as New York’s Lieutenant Governor (Hochul became governor in late 2021). Sun and Hu allegedly worked to prevent representatives of Taiwan from meeting with American officials, and Sun once wrote to a Chinese consular official that Hochul was “much more obedient” than former Governor Andrew Cuomo after she persuaded Hochul to film a Lunar New Year video.

Then there’s Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who is now running for California governor. Swalwell, then a Dublin, California city councilman, became romantically involved with a Chinese national named Christine Fang, also known as “Fang Fang,” after she enrolled at Cal State East Bay in 2011. U.S. authorities believe she was an MSS operative.

Fang introduced Swalwell to Chinese consular officials and helped him win his congressional seat. He received donations from a California-based partner at a Chinese law firm that the CCP Ministry of Justice established in the early 1990s. The FBI was so concerned that they gave Swalwell a defensive briefing. In addition to Swalwell, Fang had sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors and also targeted Tulsi Gabbard, Ro Khanna, and Judy Chu. Swalwell went on to serve on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, while Gabbard is the current Director of National Intelligence.

Imagine what the Chinese government could do with over a million potential operatives who are natural-born U.S. citizens and who have the constitutional right to vote for, campaign for, donate to, and raise money for the CCP’s preferred candidates.

Golden Opportunity

California is the most popular location for Chinese birth tourism and surrogacy, particularly in upscale portions of Los Angeles County and Orange County with significant Chinese and Chinese-American populations. These places have seen rapid growth in both residents and visitors from China, accompanied by increases in residential houses or apartment complexes that have been converted into illegal “birth tourism hotels.”

Surrogacy is a popular way for wealthy Chinese nationals to produce U.S. citizen children, in part because it is mostly unregulated. In gestational surrogacy, where the surrogate carries a child conceived using either an embryo or eggs and sperm provided by the intended parents (“IPs,” in industry lingo), the surrogate has no genetic relationship with the child. This is now California’s most common form of surrogacy.

California law is very friendly toward gestational surrogacy and surrogacy in general. It provides clear laws for the IPs to establish legal parentage before the child is born and to validate or enforce surrogacy contracts. The embryos, eggs, or sperm do not have to come from the IPs themselves; they can come from donor sources (either known or anonymous), although in practice the male IP almost always uses his own sperm to father biological children, sometimes dozens of them, as recent real-life examples have shown.

The IPs themselves don’t even have to step on U.S. soil, which is another way to avoid visa or background check issues. They can ship frozen embryos, eggs, or sperm directly to the surrogate’s IVF clinic.

IPs must be wealthy, because surrogacy is very expensive. The base fee in California for an experienced surrogate in good health may range from $55,000 to $90,000, plus an agency fee of between $35,000 and $50,000. There are a litany of other expenses involved, from medical bills to living stipends to insurance fees. The total costs can easily exceed $350,000—and sometimes much more.

But despite surrogacy’s significant expenses, demand from Chinese nationals is very high.

California has many upscale cities with significant Chinese and Chinese-American populations who speak fluent Mandarin and where business and cultural infrastructure are well established. These municipalities have thousands of Chinese restaurants, grocery stores, and other shops where a Chinese visitor would feel perfectly comfortable.

They’re also home to Mandarin-speaking lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and banking services that can transfer money from the PRC to the U.S. and amongst multiple shell companies. Chinese nationals are infamous for paying above market price, in cash, for multi-million-dollar California homes and commercial properties.

The Golden State has developed a surrogacy-friendly infrastructure that includes specialized productive endocrinologists, fertility specialists, OB/GYNs, dermatologists, clinics, testing centers, and hospitals. And, because California hospitals are legally required to provide health care to the indigent, many wealthy Chinese mothers fraudulently claim indigency and stick American taxpayers with their medical bills.

Thankfully, awareness of this issue at both the political and human level is growing. News articles in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, NBC News, CBS News, and other publications detail the dark side of birthright exploitation by Chinese nationals: the neglect, mistreatment, and abuse of dozens of innocent children genetically fathered by very wealthy Chinese men.

In some cases, entire apartment complexes have been turned into surrogacy and birth tourism hotels, in which women are instructed on how to lie on their visa applications, avoid U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and cheat the U.S. and California welfare systems. Children in these homes are often raised devoid of love and affection by rigid, abusive nannies. Some of the children have had to be hospitalized for serious conditions such as intracranial bleeding.

A Growing Threat

Because neither the California nor federal governments keep track of birth tourism or surrogacy births, no one knows exactly how many U.S. citizen babies have been born to Chinese mothers or their surrogates. But author Peter Schweizer estimates in his recent book that Chinese nationals have created between 750,000 and 1.5 million U.S. citizen children over the past 15 years.

To reiterate, these children have no allegiance to the United States. Their parents often are politically well-connected, and they are indoctrinated in the best CCP schools to view U.S. history, culture, and values through red-colored lenses. (Interestingly, China itself does not have birth citizenship and surrogacy is illegal there, though the CCP often overlooks it, especially when done overseas by government and business elites.)

None of this is to say that surrogacy by Chinese nationals or naturalized Chinese citizens is automatically or always bad. For instance, Alysa Liu is a very recent, wonderful, and inspiring example of surrogacy. Last month, Liu became the first American woman figure skater to win Olympic gold since 2002. Her father, Arthur Liu, is an attorney who had to flee China in 1989 because he protested in Guangzhou against the Chinese government. Alysa and her four siblings all were born and raised in California via gestational surrogacies through Arthur’s sperm and anonymous egg donors.

But it’s undeniable that the wider phenomenon, when facing such woefully lax oversight, presents incredible danger to U.S. national security, and the threat is only going to grow in future years.

Just last month, a federal court sentenced covert Chinese sleeper agent Yaoning “Mike” Sun to a 48-month prison term for acting as an illegal, unregistered Chinese agent for decades. Among other things, Sun targeted and was engaged to Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California, who has yet to step down. Sun’s co-conspirator, John Chen, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for acting as an unregistered Chinese agent and bribing an IRS agent. Sun is 65 years old and first moved to the U.S. in 1996, raising questions about his activities in the years before his arrest and sentencing.

The threat is rising because America has permitted nearly unrestricted birthright citizenship for decades. In addition to the national security and moral problems presented here, it is clear that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended for these fraudulent and dangerous practices to be allowed under its auspices.

The original intent of the 14th Amendment was to protect the rights of former slaves, freedmen, and their free children born on U.S. soil, not the children of citizens from foreign countries adversarial or hostile to the U.S., especially if they were here illegally. In 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, biotechnologies such as in vitro fertilization were unimaginable, and a trip to the U.S. from China would involve a dangerous, months-long journey aboard a ship.

Last November, Senator Rick Scott introduced the Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy (SAFE KIDS) Act, designed to “prevent adversarial nations, including Communist China, from using American surrogates to obtain U.S. citizenship for their children and traffic infants abroad.” For now, the bill is languishing in committee, but even if it somehow passed, it wouldn’t fully resolve the constitutional question about birthright citizenship that’s before the Supreme Court.

Thus, it’s important that in addition to the high-profile issue of birthright citizenship granted to the children of illegal immigrants, the Court should fully consider the situations described here—children born on U.S. soil to foreign parents, whether naturally or via surrogacy, who then return to their home country to continue living under its jurisdiction, and especially children born to foreign agents or operatives of countries that are adversarial to the U.S. The fact is that birthright citizenship in its current form carries real-world national security dangers that will only accelerate if left unchecked.

This is a particularly dangerous phenomenon as China continues to seek global dominance not only economically but culturally as well (just look at the Gen Z trend of “Chinamaxxing” that’s all over TikTok). To that end, one hopes that the Supreme Court and/or Congress correctly resolves the birthright citizenship issue, because 学习国语并不容易. That is: learning Mandarin is not easy.