Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer raises alarm about birth tourism following SCOTUS ruling

Author and investigative journalist, Peter Schweizer, is sounding the alarm again about foreigners who come to the United States to have children, part of a larger concern about birthright citizenship in America.

Florida Rep. Randy Fine recently talked to Fox News about introducing a House GOP bill to create barriers to birth tourism.

"What we need to do to work around this situation is make it extremely unpleasant for people to come to the United States to create an anchor baby," Fine said to Fox News. "And to anyone who disrespects our nation that much that would come here in order to create a paperwork American, should go to prison and should never be able to come to America ever again."

The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, the idea that one’s initial citizenship is defined by their birthplace. But many Republican lawmakers are looking for ways to pursue the issue despite the probable need for a constitutional amendment to move the needle.

Schweizer, the president of the Government Accountability Institute, said the Supreme Court decision, while striking down President Trump's executive order, left an opening for Congress to fix the problem without the need for a constitutional amendment.

“Yeah, it's hard to go back retroactively and fix it short of a constitutional amendment, and I don't think that's going to happen,” Schweizer said on the Just the News No Noise TV Show. The good news is, however, that the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump, has made this a priority for law enforcement.”

Fine told Fox the inspiration behind his proposed legislation was the Supreme Court upholding birthright citizenship. Fine’s legislation would criminally penalize people living outside the U.S. who travel to the country for the birth of their children. The legislation would also make it a crime to misrepresent that purpose when coming to America.

No government agency has a definitive number for birth tourism in the U.S., so data vary depending upon the organization estimating it.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors lower immigration levels, estimated in 2020 that there were roughly 20,000 to 26,000 possible births from tourists per year. 

Penn State researchers wrote a research brief using data from 2014-2024 from the National Bureau of Economic Research’s National Center for Health Statistics, which keeps track of all the live births in America. They found the number of babies born to birth tourists ranged from 5,000 to almost 10,000 a year.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there were 3.6 million births in the U.S. in 2025.