More than a thousand companies in China are openly marketing services that help wealthy Chinese nationals travel to the United States, give birth on American soil, and walk away with U.S. citizenship for their newborns, charging fees as high as $80,000 per client. That was the claim author Peter Schweizer made on Fox News this week, as the Supreme Court weighed oral arguments in a landmark challenge to President Donald Trump's executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship.
Schweizer, author of "Invisible Coup," described the practice not as a fringe loophole but as a coordinated pipeline with roots in Beijing itself. He told Fox News's "Jesse Watters Primetime" on Wednesday that the Chinese Communist Party actively promoted the scheme to its own elites over a decade ago, and that the downstream consequences are now approaching a demographic and political scale that should alarm every American voter.
The timing matters. The Supreme Court's anticipated ruling could determine whether such practices continue unchecked or face real limits under federal policy. And the numbers Schweizer cited, if accurate, suggest the problem is far larger than most Americans realize.
Schweizer traced the origin of the birth-tourism industry to a deliberate information campaign by the Chinese Communist Party roughly twelve to thirteen years ago. As he described it on Fox News:
"The Chinese Communist Party, about 12, 13 years ago, started explaining to the Chinese elite in the People's Daily, in official publications, 'Hey, guess what? Your kids can get U.S. citizenship if you do this,' and a massive industry was born."
The People's Daily is the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Schweizer's claim places the CCP not as a passive bystander but as the catalyst, using state media to teach its wealthiest citizens how to exploit a provision of the Fourteenth Amendment from halfway around the world.
What followed, Schweizer said, was the rapid growth of a commercial infrastructure inside China devoted entirely to facilitating births on U.S. soil. He put the number of companies involved at more than one thousand, with services priced as high as $80,000.
The result, in Schweizer's telling, is staggering. He estimated that between one million and one and a half million Chinese nationals who hold U.S. citizenship are currently being raised in China, not in the United States. These are individuals who, under current law, will be eligible to vote in American elections when they turn eighteen.
"The belief is that there's between a million and a million and a half Chinese nationals that are 'U.S. citizens' being raised in China right now. That means they're going to be able to vote when they turn 18 years old, and they're going to have a whole bunch of other rights."
And voting is only the beginning. Schweizer pointed to the chain-migration implications that kick in at age twenty-one.
"And when they turn 21, Jesse, they can sponsor their parents and other family members to get permanent resident status in the United States."
Schweizer did not mince words about the organized nature of what he described. He called it "industrial scale" and emphasized that the participants are not desperate migrants but members of China's privileged class.
"It is a massive effort. It is an organized effort. These are members of the Chinese elite, and the numbers are mind-boggling."
The picture Schweizer painted is one of deliberate, well-funded exploitation, not by people fleeing poverty or persecution, but by wealthy families leveraging a constitutional provision to plant citizenship flags in the United States while raising their children under the authority of a hostile foreign government. The broader birth-tourism industry has drawn scrutiny in cities like Miami, where foreign nationals from multiple countries have flocked to maternity hotels and luxury birthing suites for the same purpose.
Fox News did not cite independent documentation in its reporting to verify Schweizer's specific figures, the thousand-plus companies, the $80,000 fees, or the million-plus estimate of Chinese-born U.S. citizens living abroad. Those claims rest on Schweizer's authority as an investigative author. But the underlying mechanism he described, traveling to the U.S. to give birth and secure automatic citizenship, is well established and has been the subject of federal investigations and court cases for years.
Schweizer's warning landed as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a legal challenge to President Trump's executive order, which seeks to narrow birthright citizenship protections for children born to non-residents on U.S. soil. Trump attended the case in person, a historic appearance at the court that underscored the administration's investment in the outcome.
The case has been building for months. The Supreme Court agreed earlier this year to review the order, setting up what may be the most consequential Fourteenth Amendment case in a generation.
Demonstrators gathered outside the court on May 15, 2025, in support of birthright citizenship. Inside, the justices confronted the central question: does the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to "all persons born" in the United States apply without exception, even to children of parents who entered the country solely to obtain that citizenship and who have no intention of remaining?
The administration's position is that the original understanding of the amendment did not contemplate the kind of organized, transactional birth tourism Schweizer described. Critics of the executive order argue it would rewrite settled constitutional law by executive fiat. The justices pressed both sides hard during oral arguments, and the ruling, whenever it comes, will set the boundaries for federal immigration policy for years.
If Schweizer's estimates are even roughly correct, the implications extend well beyond immigration enforcement. A million or more U.S. citizens raised entirely in China, educated in Chinese schools, shaped by Chinese state media, and potentially loyal to Beijing's interests would represent something without precedent in American history.
They would be entitled to U.S. passports. They could vote in federal elections. At twenty-one, they could sponsor parents and relatives for permanent residency, opening a secondary channel for migration that bypasses the normal visa process entirely.
None of this requires breaking a single law under current rules. That is precisely the point Schweizer and supporters of the executive order are making: the system as written invites exploitation, and the exploitation has arrived at scale.
The administration challenged the court ahead of arguments to act decisively. Whether the justices will agree remains an open question. But the facts Schweizer laid out, a state-backed information campaign, a thousand-company commercial industry, and a population of U.S. citizens being raised under the flag of a geopolitical rival, frame the stakes in terms that go far beyond a legal technicality.
Several critical gaps remain. Fox News did not identify the specific executive order number or the case name before the Supreme Court. Schweizer's figures, particularly the estimate of one million to one and a half million Chinese-born U.S. citizens living in China, were presented without cited documentation in the broadcast. Independent verification of those numbers would strengthen the case considerably.
It is also unclear what enforcement mechanisms, if any, currently exist to track U.S. citizens born on American soil who are immediately taken abroad and raised in foreign countries. If the Supreme Court upholds the executive order, the practical question of how to implement new limits on birthright citizenship will be enormous.
What is not in dispute is the underlying incentive structure. As long as birth on U.S. soil guarantees citizenship regardless of the parents' status or intent, the incentive to exploit that guarantee will persist, and well-funded actors, including those with ties to a foreign government, will continue to take advantage.
When a hostile foreign power can use America's own Constitution to manufacture citizens loyal to its interests, the question is no longer whether reform is needed. It's whether Washington has the nerve to act before the next million passports are printed.
