The Chinese Communist Party oddly found a reason to promote the U.S. Constitution, or at least an interpretation of it, journalist and author Peter Schweizer noted before a Senate panel Tuesday.
At a hearing on birthright citizenship, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., asked Schweizer if the Chinese government promotes exploiting the concept.
“They have run articles in the People’s Daily, which is the main news organ of the Communist Party, explaining that you have a constitutional right in the United States,” said Schweizer, president of the watchdog Government Accountability Institute and author of the recent book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon.”
“There is a certain irony there, the CCP officials are explaining constitutional rights to their own elite,” Schweizer said. “There are nationalist websites that talk about it. There is discussion about this in the Chinese media. There’s no condemnation of it.”
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing Tuesday titled “Protecting American Citizenship: Birthright Citizenship for Illegal Aliens and Tourists.”
Birthright citizenship is the view that anyone born in the United States, even a child of illegal immigrants, is automatically a U.S. citizen.
The Supreme Court is set to hear a case on birthright citizenship on April 1 in the case of Trump v. Barbara about President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship.
The high court case has the potential to overturn a Supreme Court precedent going back to 1898, when the majority upheld birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, which was enacted to grant citizenship to freed slaves after the Civil War.
Schmitt, the subcommittee chairman, argued, “Citizenship should never be a loophole.”
“An entire birth tourism industry has emerged around that goal; illegal immigration is fueled by the belief that a child born here will receive automatic citizenship,” the senator said.
“The citizenship clause was written to correct a grave injustice. It was not written to create an incentive to prop up our tourism industry or incentivize illegally crossing our borders,” Schmitt said.
For China and birth tourism, Schweizer said, the “scope of this is industrial.”
“In China alone, we have identified more than 1,000 birth tourism companies that are almost exclusively focused on the United States,” Schweizer said. “Our federal government does not track this information because there is no centralized collection of information on the nationality of parents or giving birth.”
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Trump’s executive order would “overturn black letter constitutional law and statute by royal fiat.”
“It’s an attack on millions of immigrants who have contributed in countless ways to our culture and our economy,” Durbin said. “The executive order would create a permanent underclass of American-born children who would contribute to our nation and yet be denied the opportunity of citizenship.”
Durbin, Senate Democrats, and Democrat witnesses on the panel argued that immigration authorities have the authority to stop a clearly pregnant woman from entering the United States if suspected of birth tourism.
However, the law has to be enforced, Schweizer said.
Agents with Customs and Border Protection “can deny entry to somebody who is pregnant and say they want to come to the United States on a tourism visa,” Schweizer said.
“The problem is that under certain administrations, the Obama administration, the Biden administration, they were told not to do that. That was the testimony before this Homeland Security Committee of the Senate back in 2016, that Customs and Border [Protection] officials were told not to exclude people from coming to the United States in terms of birth tourism.”
He added that high-ranking Chinese officials are promoting birth tourism.
“These are not political dissidents. These are military officers. People from the Ministry of Propaganda, people that are high-ranking officials in the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, these are part of the CCP establishment.”
The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The point of contention in the upcoming Supreme Court arguments is the phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which the Trump administration argues was misinterpreted by the court’s late 19th-century ruling.
