Fetal Citizens? Birthright Citizenship, Reproductive Futurism, and the Panic over Chinese
Birth Tourism in Southern California
Working draft in preparation for submission to Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
special section, “Race, Biopolitics, and the Future”
DO NOT CITE/DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION
Sean H. Wang
Department of Geography
Syracuse University
144 Eggers Hall
Syracuse, NY 13244-1020
shwang13@syr.edu
Fetal Citizens? Birthright Citizenship, Reproductive Futurism, and the Panic over Chinese
Birth Tourism in Southern California
Abstract: In September, 2012, residents of Chino Hills, California - a wealthy suburb of Los
Angeles in San Bernardino County - exposed a maternity hotel disguised as a hillside
mansion in their city. Part of an emergent shadow industry of birth tourism, this maternity
hotel catered to pregnant Chinese women who traveled to the United States to give birth to
their children. This controversy received wide-spread media attention, as organized resident
protests against this maternity hotel argued that Chinese birth tourism represents an
immigration loophole, where foreigners were taking advantage of the jus soli birthright
citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This paper
analyzes media reports and interview transcripts after the Chino Hills controversy in order to
understand how debates about Chinese birth tourism after the controversy Chino Hills
became a lightning rod in anti-immigration debates nationally. Drawing from Lee Edelman's
(2004) concept of reproductive futurism and Eithne Luibhéid's (2013) application of it to
theorize migration controls, this paper argues for all parties involved in these debates
mobilized the figure of the (fetal) child and her U.S. citizen-ness in the future to construct
their political arguments. Thus, not only does the panic over Chinese birth tourism constitute
a racialized violence where the history of anti-Asian fear is resurrected, it ironically forces
certain migrant women to resort to a pro-life defense in order to secure a right that ought to
be universal for all women - that is, the right to give birth under safe conditions without
threat of deportation.
Keywords: birthright citizenship, reproductive futurism, birth tourism, immigration,
transnational family, China
In September 2012, residents of Chino Hills, California—an extremely wealthy suburb in San
Bernardino County—reported a sewage spill from a hillside mansion. According to media
reports, first by a local newspaper, then by the Los Angeles Times, and finally by national media
outlets like the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and FOX News, local residents had been
suspicious of the goings-on at this mansion for a long time because people who lived there did
not seem friendly and kept to themselves. With the sewage spill and the subsequent code
inspection, the mansion was exposed as a ‘maternity hotel’. The owner had subdivided the house
into numerous rooms to accommodate more than ten Chinese women at a time. He had installed
a commercial-grade kitchen and hired cooks and nurses to look after the women staying there,
waiting to give birth (PBS, 2013).
2
When code violations are found, a citation is usually issued and the investigation ends
once the building is brought up to code. However, a few Chino Hills residents, upon learning
about this code violation citation, picketed the mansion for what they saw as an instance of
‘illegal immigration’. They argued that these pregnant women and their families took advantage
of the U.S. Constitution to secure citizenship for their children—so-called ‘anchor babies’—and,
eventually, their entire extended family. After forming a group called “Not in Chino Hills!”
(NICH), these residents began lobbying local politicians to address this supposed immigration
loophole. NICH members flooded municipal and regional council meetings in the San Gabriel
Valley, voicing their concerns about welfare-cheating and burdens on taxpayers to local
governments. Their civic participation prompted Los Angeles County Councilman, Don Knabe,
to set up a multi-agency taskforce to look into this issue. The Los Angeles Times ran a series of
16 articles on the Chino Hills controversy. By July 2013, the maternity hotel in Chino Hills was
abandoned.
The Chino Hills controversy appears to be an isolated instance involving a particular
tactic of transnational family formation (Ho, 2008), but it is in fact part of a global ‘birth
tourism’ industry, sustained by complex transnational assemblages (e.g., Lindquist et al, 2012)
and made possible by jus soli (right of the soil) birthright citizenship laws. Usually considered a
form of medical tourism, birth tourism (or ‘maternity tourism’) describes the practice where
pregnant women cross international borders to receive maternity care and give birth (Connell,
2013; Roberts and Scheper-Hughes, 2011). Although motivations behind birth tourism vary,
many opponents point to the lure of citizenship or legal status for either expectant mothers or
their children as a significant pull factor. Dubbed ‘citizenship tourism’, these cases occur
globally in places including Ireland (White and Gilmartin, 2008), the U.K. (Bewley et al, 2014;
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Gilligan, 2013), Canada (Wong, 2014; Sibley, 2013), Hong Kong (Craven, 2012), and the U.S.
and its territories (Coleman, 2013). Although small in number compared to immigrant
populations at large, alleged instances of citizenship tourism have figured prominently in recent
citizenship debates in both Canada and the U.S. (Mas, 2014; Jacobson, 2010).
In southern California, birth tourism—as practiced informally through transnational
kinship networks—is well known to residents. In recent years, however, incidents like the Chino
Hills controversy suggest the emergence of an organized shadow industry that has
commercialized birth tourism (though its size is exaggerated by sensationalist reporting; Medina,
2011). In particular, birth tourism has become a lightning rod in state-wide fights over ‘illegal
immigration’, where anti-immigration politicians and activists have argued that the Fourteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants citizenship on the jus soli basis, is driving
birth tourism to the U.S. and should be abolished. This claim is often made with offensive and
incendiary language, describing pregnant migrant women—especially Latinas—as “multiplying
rats” (Cisneros, 2013, page 291) and their children as “anchor babies” (Lederer, 2013; Ignatow
and Williams, 2011). Through these political debates over birthright citizenship, a nascent racial
politics is emerging in the U.S. Asians and Latinos are both perceived as threats, but Latinos are
seen as stereotypical poor migrants strategizing to remain in the U.S. (Tobar, 2011), while
Asians are seen as using their financial clout to buy their way in instead (Lu, 2014; Beech, 2013).
As one Californian anti-immigration activist put it, whether Mexican anchor babies or Chinese
birth tourism, “[i]t’s invasion by birth canal” (Templeton, 2010).
As the Chino Hills controversy demonstrates, birth tourism is not simply a product of jus
soli citizenship laws but rather a nexus of citizenship regimes, global migrations, and racial
formations (Roberts, 1997), and the panic it induced a form of racialized violence that augments
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reproductive futurism’s role in securing the nation (Luibhéid, 2013). Although xenophobic
responses in the Chino Hills controversy are just another episode in the longue durée of antiAsian fear in the U.S. (Tchen and Yeats, 2014), birth tourism emerges for particular reasons
during these biopolitical times. The focus on the (fetal) child and her U.S. citizenship—both as a
supposed pull-factor for Chinese migration to the U.S. and a mark of inauthentic American
identity—demonstrates that the different routes to citizenship and the temporality of political
subject formation are essential in understanding contemporary immigration debates in the U.S. In
this paper, I will introduce the role of birthright citizenship in immigration politics, and draw on
the concept of reproductive futurism to understand how immigration politics is worked through
the figure of the (fetal) citizen-child in birth tourism panics. In subsequent sections, I draw on
analysis of media reports during the Chino Hills controversy and my own preliminary fieldwork
to show how reproductive futurism is mobilized by both opponents and proponents/practitioners
of birth tourism to stake their political claims as proper American citizens.
Birthright citizenship and the history of racial exclusions in the U.S.
The key argument mobilized against birth tourism is that it is a tactic that exploits a supposed
immigration loophole, that by giving birth in the U.S., the entire family could secure U.S.
citizenship. Even though this argument ignores a litany of complications—including the waiting
time between the child’s birth and her twenty-first birthday (which is the earliest she could
sponsor her direct kin for permanent residency), and little to no evidence that U.S. citizenship is
the primary pull-factor for migration—anti-immigration politicians and activists have argued that
the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants citizenship on a jus soli basis,
is driving birth tourism to the U.S. and should be abolished. The Chino Hills controversy—and
5
the subsequent political organizing by NICH—is a particular instance where certain forms of
families and their practices have come into conflict with, and struggled against, regulations based
on legal categories of citizenship. In this section, I will survey the history of jus soli birthright
citizenship in the U.S. in order to situate current efforts to repeal it.
Citizenship has only been a prominent research theme in geography since the 1990s, but
work on it has proliferated to the point where a recent review likened it to Waldo of the Where’s
Waldo? fame, that geographers’ “incessant search for [citizenship] makes [it] seem
simultaneously illusive and ubiquitous” (Staeheli, 2010, page 393). Indeed, a cursory search of
the geographic literature reveals an explosion in the number of books and articles with
citizenship as a keyword, and special issues on citizenship appear almost annually (e.g., Painter
and Philo, 1995; Staeheli, 2003; Desforges et al, 2005; Kurtz and Hankins, 2005; Dickinson et al,
2008). Most scholarship on citizenship traces its conceptual origins to the Greco-Roman era,
when being a citizen entails formal belonging to a polity where participation in the public
decision-making is a right (Painter and Philo, 1995; Isin, 2012). This conceptual lineage is
reinforced in the rise of liberalism, linking citizenship to the inception of modern nation-states
(Marston and Mitchell, 2004). In this model, citizenship binds an individual to a nation-state, to
which he is afforded a set of rights but also must fulfill a set of obligations (Bauböck, 2010; Ho,
2008).
Although citizenship traditionally has been the domain of political theory, geography has
made significant contributions to its study in a short period of time. In particular, geographers
have been at the forefront of expanding citizenship’s conceptual reach by emphasizing its extralegal dimensions. Feminist geographers, for example, have revealed the seemingly genderneutral figure of the citizen to be a myth, detailing how citizenship as a formal category is built
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on masculinist assumptions and a strict enforcement of the public/private divide (Marston, 1990).
Others have traced citizenship’s exclusionary elements from its origin in the Greco-Roman
period, where women, non-property owners, and slaves were excluded, to its contemporary
manifestations where access to citizenship remains unequal and uneven in the U.S. and globally
(Glenn, 2000; Varsanyi, 2008; Tyler, 2010). Citizenship, these scholars argue collectively, rests
on liberalism’s paradox: “[o]nly by curtailing the liberty of individuals who fall outside a given
nation-state can the liberty of those within be guaranteed” (Bloemraad et al, 2008, page 164).
Geographers studying citizenship, sensitive to the necessity of grounding theories to particular
places and scales, have predominantly focused their attention on how citizenship’s exclusionary
elements manifest in everyday life (e.g., Ehrkamp and Leitner, 2003; Secor, 2004; Conlon,
2010).
Within this large geographic literature on citizenship, birthright citizenship is a topic that
has only just begun receiving attention and only in a cursory manner (e.g., Isin, 2012; Bauder,
2014; White and Gilmartin, 2008). In contrast, birthright citizenship has been—and remains—a
prominent object of inquiry in political theory and cognate disciplines like sociology and legal
studies (e.g., Menzel, 2013; Volpp, 2011; Ngai, 2007). This relative neglect, I suggest, precisely
stems from geographers’ tendency to ground studies of citizenship in everyday life. Barnett and
Low (2004, page 9) had critiqued geographers for preferring scales of analysis that “tend to be
both above and below the nation-state” (see also Desforges et al, 2005, page 440). Borrowing
Castles and Davidson’s (2000) distinction, most geographic studies of citizenship focus on the
experiences of “being a citizen” at the expense of exploring processes of “becoming a citizen”,
especially their formal, legal dimensions. This distinction is to some degree a false one. It is
obvious that the route through which one becomes a citizen, or even one’s (in)ability to become
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a citizen, has a direct impact on one’s everyday experience of being a citizen; there is an
abundance of scholarship on undocumented Latino migrants in the U.S., for example, that
demonstrates the intertwined nature of the two analytical categories above (e.g., Varsanyi, 2006).
Nonetheless, I insist here that geographers, while retaining their focus on the grounded
experiences of citizenship, should pay greater attention to birthright citizenship and, more
broadly, various legal mechanisms of becoming a citizen.
Chinese birth tourism and the Chino Hills controversy demonstrate the analytical utility
of “becoming a citizen.” If geographers recognize that “laws are social production at its most
literal” (Cresswell, 2006, page 158) and take legal categories as the starting point of analysis,
then it is possible to frame both the Chinese’s supposed desire for U.S. citizenship and southern
California residents’ protests as part of the same multi-scalar struggle over what are the
appropriate national membership criteria (e.g., Bauder, 2012; Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, 2002);
in other words, who can be counted as a legitimate U.S. citizen. Although NICH’s protests took
place in their neighborhoods, the very object being fought over is about national citizenship and
belonging. Hence, focusing on diverse routes toward becoming a citizen allows for a multi-scalar
analysis that does not eschew national-level politics. Another reason why geographers should
pay greater attention to legal categories of citizenship is that they allow us to historicize
seemingly contemporary struggles over citizenship criteria. This issue is particularly salient in
the Chino Hills controversy, as the main group (the Chinese) and the main institution (jus soli
birthright citizenship) under attack have an intertwined and, at times, contradictory history
solidified in the various Chinese Exclusion Acts since 1884 (not repealed until 1943) and the
1898 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. In these two events, particular
ideas about race and immigration crystallized in—and were continually reinforced through—jus
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soli birthright citizenship in the U.S. What follows in the rest of this section is my attempt at a
cursory trace of this intertwining legacy to the contemporary debates over repealing jus soli in
the U.S.
Historian Mae Ngai has written perhaps the definitive history on the intersection of race
and immigration laws prior to 1965 (Ngai, 1999; 2005). Here I focus on a more recent article
(Ngai, 2007) in which she articulated the historical and contemporary connections between antiAsian racism and jus soli birthright citizenship in the U.S. Although jus soli has been in practice
since the founding of the United States, it was only available to white Americans. The
Fourteenth Amendment, one of the Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution,
formally enshrined jus soli primarily so that former slaves and their descendants could access
U.S. citizenship (see also Molina, 2014). However, legal questions remained whether Asians
born on U.S. soil would apply under the Fourteenth Amendment, given that various exclusionary
legislations had made Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship (Ngai, 1999). This matter was
not settled until 1898, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that
the Fourteenth Amendment did indeed apply to all persons born on U.S. soil, irrespective of
whether said persons were eligible for citizenship (via naturalization) based on racial exclusions
(see also Hartry, 2012). Despite this legal victory, various racial exclusions from immigration
and naturalization remained in force and served “as constant pressures against realization of full
citizenship rights of the native-born” (Ngai, 2007, page 2529).
Ngai characterized the anti-jus soli campaigns as a logical extension of racial exclusions.
Commenting on the pre-Wong Kim Ark political rhetoric, she wrote, “The anti-Chinese nativists
understood that granting citizenship to the children of Chinese assured permanent settlement and
an accretion of the Chinese population, thereby undermining the very objectives of exclusion”
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(Ngai, 2007, page 2528). More than a century later, the same rhetoric of securing the future
nation against racial contagions continues to animate anti-jus soli campaigns (Oliviero, 2013;
Tormey, 2007) and anti-immigration more generally (e.g., Cisneros, 2008). This theme is one
that I will pick up again in the next section under the lens of reproductive futurism.
Contemporary anti-jus soli campaigns in the U.S. generally draw their legitimacy from
Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith’s (1985) Citizenship Without Consent, in which the two legal
scholars argued that the Fourteenth Amendment should not apply to children of ‘aliens’ in the
U.S. Jus soli, they argued, is a feudal remnant from the English common law that had no place in
a republic, where citizenship is based on consent. Accordingly, the Fourteenth Amendment is
only applicable to those “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and, contra-Wong Kim Ark, the
jurisdiction in question is a political one based on consent and not a territorial one. Schuck and
Smith’s interpretation has been roundly criticized by various constitutional law experts (Aber
and Small, 2013, page 82), and Smith himself offered a (grudging) reversal in 2009 (CullitonGonzalez, 2012, page 142). A thorough legal rebuttal of Schuck and Smith’s argument is beyond
the scope here; instead, following Ngai, I will highlight how the issue of consent can be framed
differently when one historicizes birthright citizenship.
Schuck and Smith were concerned that jus soli represents a route that assigns citizenship
without consent of the polity; in other words, it is a form of “ascriptive” citizenship. In their
view, the consent of the polity is secured when one is recognized by the state, and voluntarily
consents to being recognized, as a citizen. Thus, undocumented migrants, having unlawfully
entered U.S. territories, do not have the state’s consent and are not subject to its jurisdiction.
Ngai quite strongly argued, however, that “the racial history of citizenship reveals the principle
of mutual consent to be a myth” (Ngai, 2007, page 2529). Opponents of jus soli ignore that both
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forms of birthright citizenship, jus soli and jus sanguinis (right of blood or descent), are
ascriptive; only naturalized citizens have given explicit consent to their rights and obligations to
the state (see also Somerville, 2005; Fortier, 2013). Extending Ngai’s argument, Irene Bloemraad
pointed out that collapsing both forms of birthright citizenship as ascriptive ignores important
differences between the two; viewing citizenship acquisition “as a simple dichotomy of consent
or ascription is… problematic, since ascription through descent [jus sanguinis] is qualitatively
more restrictive for immigrant populations than ascription through territorial birth [jus soli]”
(Bloemraad, 2013, page 62). Furthermore, consent is not the only principle that the Fourteenth
Amendment rests on; its Equal Protections Clause effectively placed egalitarianism above
consent (see also Rodriguez, 2009). Citizenship based on a strong consensual framework has in
fact enabled racial exclusions, since “[t]he application of consent between a state and an
individual is one of grossly unequal power, especially when the state is controlled by a group of
individuals—even a democratic majority—that holds prejudice or animus toward another group”
(Bloemraad, 2013, page 63). Jus soli thus reflects that egalitarian promise, especially to migrants
without legal statuses.
Viewed in this light, anti-jus soli rhetoric—like those during the Chino Hills
controversy—remains a tactic of racial exclusion today. In fact, the Chino Hills controversy
came on the heels of a number of international and national decisions that sought to limit ‘illegal’
immigration by either imposing stricter border restrictions, limiting or eliminating jus soli, or
both. Many scholars have commented on the logic behind border fortification and migration
control and the trend to alter existing birthright citizenship laws as a strategy to prevent
migration (e.g., Brown, 2010). Some notable incidents in this trend include Ireland’s referendum
to eliminate jus soli, effective in 2005, supposedly in response to in the influx of asylum seekers
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from Africa (Luibhéid, 2013; Ní Mhurchú, 2011; Conlon, 2010; Tormey, 2007); India’s
elimination of jus soli in 2004, in response to refugees from Bangladesh (Sadiq, 2008); and many
others—Australia and France included—that introduced waiting time and additional restrictions
to claiming citizenship on a jus soli basis. Currently, the U.S. and Canada are the only remaining
developed countries that observe the jus soli principle with little to no restrictions.1 We can see
in this trend a global effort by increasingly xenophobic states that use the growing migrant
population as a scapegoat for declining welfare domestically.
In an interesting convergence, both Ayelet Shachar and Jacqueline Stevens have begun
theorizing birthright citizenship as private property. In The Birthright Lottery, Shachar (2009)
theorized birthright citizenship as a particular form of inherited property and argued that her
reorientation enables us to ask the questions of distributive justice with regards to the spoils of
birthright citizenship. Stevens is more radical than Shachar. Although they agreed that birthright
citizenship is a form of private property, for Stevens (2010) it would logically follow that just
like other forms of private property, our goal should be to abolish them all and enact new forms
of governance that do not reproduce (neo)liberal, capitalist nation-states. Both Shachar and
Stevens, however, suffered from the same elision committed by Schuck and Smith that, in
practice, understates the explicit differences in political orientation between jus soli and jus
sanguinis principles of birthright citizenship (see also Mancini and Finlay, 2008, pages 588-589).
Nonetheless, their radical critique reveals citizenship to be a particular and peculiar form of
commodity that resists unfettered mobility. The racial history of U.S. citizenship reveals it to be
not just private property (which already connotes class politics) but, as David Eng (2010, page
1
Germany is an exception to this exclusionary trend, having relaxed its citizenship requirements in recent
years; however, it had a strong jus sanguinis citizenship that prioritized a racially exclusive nation prior to
the relaxation, and even today it still has one of the most stringent citizenship requirements in the world
(Anil, 2006; 2005).
12
45) suggested, a racialized property. In other words, it is attached to particular bodies (Luibhéid,
2013, pages 161-167).2 This racialized history over incorporation of citizens into the U.S. nation,
then, haunts birth tourism and debates over jus soli birthright citizenship in the present day.
Racialized reproductive futurism in U.S. immigration politics
Through the local debates over birth tourism, the intertwining of race, citizenship, and
childbearing becomes visible in Southern California. With the national media portraying it as a
flashpoint in immigration debates, birth tourism is transformed into a ground in which political
debates over birthright citizenship could erupt. What happens in these political debates when the
‘fetal child’ is recognized not just as a subject, but as a (potential) citizen? In this section, I
address this question through the lens of reproductive futurism. I argue that birthright citizenship
provides the legal mechanism through which reproductive futurism functions, especially jus soli
in the case of migrants who are not yet citizens. Consequently, birthright citizenship laws
become a tool through which the state could engineer the desired national population for the
future, as well as the target for anti-immigration rhetoric.
As geographers, we are naturally inclined to identify space, place, and scale as our
objects of analysis and all three have been framed as potential sites for politics (Barnett and Low,
2004, page 9). In contrast, geographers have only recently begun exploring how temporality
figures at the heart of political practices (cf., Massey, 1992; May and Thrift, 2001; Amin, 2010).
2
Luibhéid demonstrated this point by discussing one legal decision in particular: the European Court of
Justice ruled that in cases of alleged “citizenship tourism,” “there is certainly no basis for criticizing
[migrants] for legitimately taking advantage of the opportunities and rights available to them under
Community law,” and to criticize them for operating within the existing legal boundaries means that
“suspicions of abuse could be raised in almost all cases of intentional acquisition of nationality,”
including, for example, French people becoming Belgian citizens to avoid high tax rates or naturalization
through investments in places like Malta and the U.S. (Luibhéid, 2013, page 167). Of course, Jacqueline
Stevens would argue that this ruling demonstrates precisely how all forms of nationalist citizenship, like
private properties, deserve to be abolished and transformed into alternative modes of governance.
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Within this emergent geographic literature, the future and futurity has received a great deal of
attention, especially for how they serve as the conditions of possibility for current politics (e.g.,
Katz, 2008; 2011; Mitchell, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Amin, 2013). This section contributes to this
conversation by exploring how reproductive futurism serves as a productive lens through which
to view the discussions around Chinese birth tourism.
In No Future, Lee Edelman (2004) argues that reproductive futurism is a heteronormative
tactic that invokes the imaginary child for whom the society must demand a better future that is
complete with capitalist success, heterosexual nuclear family, and further reproduction. The
figure of the innocent child, then, becomes a “‘disciplinary image’ that performs the ‘mandatory
cultural labor of social reproduction’” (Edelman, 2004, page 19 cited in Katz, 2008, page 14).
Reproductive futurism discursively casts non-heterosexuals – and gay men, especially – as
subjects who do not belong in the future, and their non-reproduction would ultimately result in
social death. Edelman’s provocative claim on the relationship between queer sexuality and
(biological and social) reproduction has spurred a number of fascinating research directions –
both a strong backlash against, and a more nuanced reading of, anti-sociality within queer theory.
Regardless of its reception, Edelman’s claim has produced a much more critical attention on the
figure of the child as the innocent justification in current politics (see also Enloe, 1990).
Geographers and others writing on futurity have since built on Edelman’s work, and here
I draw heavily from Eithne Luibhéid’s (2013) book Pregnant on Arrival, where she documented
the events leading up to Ireland’s 2004 decision to abolish its jus soli birthright citizenship in
response to the perceived threat of asylum seekers from Africa, to place reproductive futurism in
immigration politics. Following Edelman (2004), Luibhéid argued that migrants in Ireland are
also abjected through reproductive futurism, though in a different way than gay men. The
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abolishment of jus soli hinged on the Irish state’s claim that “migrant women’s childbearing
threatened… a desirable future for ‘properly’ Irish citizens” (Luibhéid, 2013, page 150). Since
their children were no longer Irish citizens, many migrants then lost their only realistic avenue to
gaining legal status. Luibhéid argued that here reproductive futurism has sinister material
consequences. Legally, it potentially produces generations of stateless people who are born in
Ireland but could claim citizenship from neither Ireland nor their parents’ country of origin (e.g.,
Kerber, 2009; Constable, 2014). Not only did the decision “limit their future entitlements but
also render them vulnerable to becoming designated as ‘illegal’ and deportable in their own
right” (Luibhéid, 2013, page 150). Reproductive futurism here was worked by the Irish state to
ensure that there is no future for not just migrants, but their children and their children’s children
as well.
I use Luibhéid’s work here because it demonstrates what many scholars have argued, that
reproductive futurism is explicitly racialized. Cindi Katz, for example, has repeatedly shown us
that Edelman’s figure of the innocent child does not preclude – and in certain instances actually
necessitates – the reconfiguration of certain children as waste (Katz, 2011; 2008, page 14).
Luibhéid explicitly argued that the 2004 referendum again reinscribed Ireland as a white nation.
Although migrants’ supposed lack of connection to Ireland was used as a justification to abolish
jus soli, those of Irish descent born outside of Ireland could still acquire citizenship through jus
sanguinis for up to two generations. The families that the Irish state protects, then, are explicitly
heterosexual and white. Indeed, there is a frightening similarity between the 2004 Irish
referendum and the pre-Wong Kim Ark nativists referenced by Ngai (2007) except, in the latter
case, their claims were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
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By this same logic, reproductive futurism is always about the reproduction of the nation.
For my argument, it is important to direct the analytic of reproductive futurism toward another
court case in the lead-up to the 2004 referendum. In a previous chapter, Luibhéid analyzed the
2002 legal appeal to the Irish High Court by Ms. O, a pregnant Nigerian citizen whose legal
counsel sought to halt her deportation by drawing on an explicit pro-life rhetoric and arguing that
the Irish state would be violating the right to life of Ms. O’s unborn if her deportation proceeded
(see also Gilmartin and White, 2011). Luibhéid argued that the O case reveals the deep
contradiction in which the state seeks to use women’s reproduction as a means to regulate
mobility both into and out of its borders. Ms. O’s case was only able to proceed because the Irish
state’s formal recognition of the fetal child as a subject and a citizen in need of protection in its
Constitution. The irony is that if Ms. O won her appeal, it would offer “relief to many other
migrant women facing deportation” but, paradoxically, its pro-life logic would also “have
oppressive consequences for any woman” – Irish, migrant, or otherwise – “who is or may
become pregnant” (Luibhéid, 2013, page 138). In the end, Ms. O’s appeal was denied and she
was deported before her child was born.
What Luibhéid may have underestimated—and what geographers writing on futurity and
race have argued—is that reproductive futurism is never just about the future but always about
disciplinary power in the present; in fact, reproductive futurism allows for a temporal frame of
discipline that is counted not in months or years, but generations both forward and back.3 Hence,
3
This point about the temporal expansion of discipline through reproductive futurism cannot be
overstated. Not only does the temporal frame works backward through an increasing emphasis on the
child and the fetus, it also expands forward to shore up the intertwining of proper families and notions of
morality. In the context of migration controls, the emergence of family reunification (for, of course, of
those with proper “family values”) means that – in addition to satisfying a number of legal, financial, and
bureaucratic criteria that base upon the nexus of neoliberalism and welfare reform – migrants must always
prove they are morally deserving of inclusion by the state (e.g., Luibhéid, 2013, ch. 3; Gerken, 2013, chs.
2 and 5). The popular rhetoric portraying “anchor babies” as a tactic by undocumented immigrants to
16
when reproductive futurism was at work in the O case, it functioned in explicitly racialized forms
that forced Ms. O to resort to a pro-life defense in order to avoid deportation. I would argue that
reproductive futurism’s central paradox is not the fact that the pro-life logic might offer some
women relief while threatening all women’s rights as Luibhéid indicated – this is merely the
consequence when that paradox comes into contact with migration controls. The central paradox
is that the pro-life logic itself is fundamentally racialized, so that after “the right to life of the
unborn” was enshrined in the Irish Constitution, the Irish state must continue wrestling with the
conundrum that, in fact, only the white and ‘properly Irish’ unborns will be given the full right to
life in Ireland.
This central paradox of racialization becomes readily apparent when one contrasts two
previous court cases that challenged the pro-life Irish Constitution. Although the Irish state bans
abortions within its boundary, it does guarantee women’s right to travel abroad for the express
intention to secure an abortion (usually in the U.K.). This apparent contradiction came into being
in 1992, when a teenage Irish girl, X, became pregnant after she was raped. The Irish state
initially issued an injunction barring X and her parents from leaving Ireland to secure an abortion
but, following public outcry, the Irish Supreme Court affirmed the right of women to travel
abroad for abortion. Compare the X case to the C case. C was a teenage Traveler who also
became pregnant through rape in 1997. Although C was allowed to seek an abortion abroad, she
did not garner public sympathy in the same way that X did; instead, various media reports made
it seem that if not she, then at least her Traveler culture, brought her rape and subsequent
secure U.S. citizenship also ignores the temporal restrictions on family sponsors for citizenship: that
supposed anchor for the family must be at least 21 years old in order to sponsor her direct kin. Not to
mention, “anchor baby” is an extremely derogatory and dehumanizing term (Ignatow and Williams,
2011). Thus, for those families who choose to remain in the U.S. in the interim, many face social
exclusion and lack of access to services (Fujiwara, 2008), as well as the threat of deportation and family
separation (Wessler, 2011).
17
pregnancy upon herself. Quoting Ruth Fletcher, Luibhéid (2013, page 135) argued that “public
discourses effectively implied that ‘while X was to be spared motherhood because of her
innocence, C was to be spared motherhood because she was unfit for it’ ”.
The intersection of reproductive futurism and migration controls produces racialized
violence like the rhetoric directed against C (and not X). It is in migration controls that the
racialized paradox of reproductive futurism is made explicit. In the context of asylum seekers in
Ireland, Luibhéid insisted on characterizing migration controls as violence despite the
“extraordinary difficulties of having that characterization taken seriously” (Luibhéid, 2013, page
21). Gerry Pratt (2012) also argued that since migration controls are legally sanctioned, citizens
usually do not think of them as violent instruments despite their part in making all migrants “a
separate, less entitled, and more vulnerable population” (Luibhéid, 2013, page 21). Citizens’
common conception that migration controls are legitimate and thus non-violent often leads to the
belief that migrants already have rights (and the supposed protections those rights afford them).
Any additional efforts on the migrants’ part to secure a more just condition – whether in terms of
legal status, economic opportunities, or civil rights protections – is then seen as redundant, overreaching, or worst, cheating the welfare system. As one Tennessee state lawmaker famously
remarked, pregnant illegal immigrants are “rats [that] multiply” in the U.S., taking advantage of
state maternity benefits (Cisneros, 2013, page 290). If Hannah Arendt (2002, page 19) is right
that violence always needs implements, then considering the intersection of reproductive
futurism and migration controls as a form of violence not only pushes us to consider the ways in
which violence is instrumentalized for certain political aims, but also the power structures behind
its implementation (e.g., structural racism). “Power is indeed of the essence of all government,
18
but violence is not,” Arendt wrote. “Everything depends upon the power behind the violence”
(pages 30-31).
If we understand reproductive futurism as not just about the future and already racialized,
then we can see in Ms. O’s legal appeal its deep contradiction when both proponents and
opponents of women’s rights base their legal arguments on the figure of the (fetal) child. Indeed,
it is ironic when one has to resort to the pro-life logic to champion what should be a universal
woman’s right – that is, the right to give birth under safe conditions without threat of deportation.
Although Luibhéid’s argument is modest, I actually think that the ironic contradiction she
identified, when the ‘fetal child’ is recognized as a both a subject and a citizen, is evident in a
whole host of political issues now. For example, we see one particular demonstration of this
logic in President Obama’s recent order that immigration judges should consider “family
connections” in deportation proceedings, in response to immigration activists’ calls to “stop
deporting future [U.S.] citizens” (Wessler, 2013, emphasis added; see also Bhabha, 2009).
Karma Chávez’s writings on this issue show a similar contradiction at work, when
undocumented migrants facing deportation use their U.S. citizen child – born on U.S. soil – to
argue for their reprieve, alongside or neglecting altogether the structural critique of migrant
detention (Chávez, 2013, pages 104-109).4 Thus, although Luibhéid is absolutely correct that
reproductive futurism’s internal contradiction produces racialized violence (often in the form of
differential pro-life defense), an intersectional analysis is required to identify in each instance:
(1) What rights – and whose rights – are being fought for at the expense of a pro-choice defense;
and (2) how important the fetus’s or the child’s legal citizenship status is.
4
In a similar vein, the always-brilliant Yasmin Nair (2011) discussed the Shirley Tan case through the
tired trope of ‘worthy immigrants’.
19
Local responses to the Chino Hills controversy
In this section, I mobilize the analytics developed in the previous sections to make sense of the
rhetoric surrounding Chinese birth tourism and the Chino Hills controversy. My methods consist
primarily of media and document analysis and interviews conducted with various stakeholders in
March 2014. The media materials include all reporting done on the Chino Hills controversy by
the Los Angeles Times, as well as select regional and national media outlets. The documents
under review include materials published by NICH online, as well as meeting minutes from
various city and county councils in the region where the issue of Chinese birth tourism was under
debate. Finally, I spoke to a number of local residents and stakeholders off-the-record; I was able
to interview on-the-record a Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning employee
who is on the multi-agency taskforce addressing maternity hotels, and a Taiwanese couple—
Howard and Margie—who operates a maternity hotel in the San Gabriel Valley.
Media and document analysis is informative here because they reveal how the regional
media and residents, respectively, make sense of Chinese birth tourism and the subsequent
controversy of jus soli. Analysis of media coverage of the Chino Hills controversy is especially
important because they tend to originate from right-leaning media outlets (particularly online
media; Ignatow and Williams, 2011) and reinforce anti-immigration stereotypes (Lederer, 2013).
I also present some of my interview excerpts with Howard and Margie to show how the brokers
of birth tourism understand their business practices in relation to the growing controversy in the
region. Given that my doctoral dissertation research on the transnational networks of Chinese
birth tourism is still ongoing, the following section offers only preliminary examples of themes
outlined in the previous sections. In particular, materials presented are intended to show the ways
in which people on both sides of this controversy draw on the figure of the citizen-child, both the
20
ones already here and the ones that may come in the future, to bolster their political arguments.
Through their comments, one can map out individuals’ specific subject positions within the
infrastructure of U.S. citizenship (Sadiq, 2008) legally (in terms of legal statuses and pathways to
citizenship), rhetorically (in representations of ‘proper’ citizens), spatially (within the U.S. and
transnationally), and psychically (vis-à-vis claims of national belonging and the American
Dream).
For opponents of birth tourism, both Los Angeles county councilman Don Knabe and
NICH’s de facto leader Rossana Mitchell relied heavily on the figure of the citizen-child to
simultaneously attack ‘illegal immigrants’ and humanize their targets (Chang, 2013b). Both
Knabe and Mitchell have repeatedly stated these Chinese birth tourists are exploiting a U.S.
citizenship loophole, although Knabe has since backed off on those comments recently and
instead toed the official line (that maternity hotels are a zoning issue, not an immigration issue).5
Mitchell, in particular, drew heavily from the trope of ‘worthy immigrants’ (Nair, 2011) to
demarcate those who belong in the U.S. nation and those who do not. In a filmed interview,
Mitchell spent considerable time recounting her status as an authentic and rule-following
American immigrant: “On an ethical level, I think [birth tourism] is very concerning, it’s not
very American… As an immigrant myself – I came here when I was eight years old; my father
came over here, first, left our entire family, worked two jobs, earned enough money to send visas
for our family… We are all citizens now, we’re very proud to be Americans, and we worked
really hard at it. Essentially, birth tourism is like buying citizenship” (PBS, 2013).
Similar sentiments were echoed by other residents as well, particularly Asian-American
residents. Immediately following the Chino Hills controvery, the Chinese American Association
Compare Knabe’s comments in the PBS feature (PBS, 2013), and to the Los Angeles Times (Chang,
2013c).
5
21
of Chino Hills (CAACH) had sent out a letter condemning the practice of birth tourism, citing—
in particular—concerns for pregnant Chinese women’s well-being and their fetuses’ safety
(CAACH, 2012). NICH then featured this letter prominently on their website, presumably to
demonstrate that their opposition to Chinese birth tourism and jus soli is not a ‘race’ issue. Two
CAACH members were also interviewed by PBS, and both backed up Mitchell’s ‘worthy
immigrant’ story. “I feel it’s not right and I think I did all whatever necessary to get my
citizenship, from beginning until now, and I think that’s the right process to do it,” said Ann
Lim. Lou Alfonso also commented, “I have a soft spot for people who want to come to the U.S.
because – like them – I came from outside the U.S., but I went through the legal process, the
right way of doing it. It’s not the fault of those pregnant women; any parent would like their
children to have a better life. Now this business of maternity hotels is doing in a way that I feel
like is exploiting the constitution of the U.S.” (PBS, 2013).
It may seem surprising that Asian-American residents are not more sympathetic toward
Chinese birth tourists for the length to which they were willing to go to secure U.S. citizenship
for their newborns. However, strong condemnation from precisely Asian-American residents is
not only expected but demanded by the prevailing rhetoric surrounding Chinese birth tourism.
Lending credence to Ngai’s (1999) argument that Asians were and remain the ‘alien citizen’
against which U.S. citizenship secures itself, anything less than a strong condemnation of
Chinese birth tourism might result in Asian-Americans being portrayed as not patriotic enough.
Indeed, it appears that the physical appearance of ‘race’ is something even strong condemnation
cannot conquer. Following the Chino Hills controversy, two particular sets of racial tensions
have been documented in the regional media: the first being a general suspicion against Asians,
especially pregnant Asian women; the second being the hostility from Asian residents toward
22
those perceived to be a ‘birth tourist’. For the first set of racial tensions, the Los Angeles County
Department of Regional Planning reported a huge spike in the number of false complaints of
suspected maternity hotels it received following the media reports on Chino Hills. Most of these
complaints are based on “groups of pregnant Asian – possibly Chinese – women congregating in
public” or “…going to a house together.”6 This particular and peculiar form of racial profiling
against Asian (American) women produced suspicion and feelings of injustice. For example,
long-time resident Annie Ren told the Los Angeles Times, “People look at me like, ‘Is she from
the hotel?’ This city wasn’t like this before. I grew up here” (Chang, 2012a). The second set of
racial tensions emerged in response to these feelings. Asian American Association of Chino
Hills, for instance, called birth tourism “an outrageous exploitation of the United States
constitution,” while simultaneously expressing concerns for the well-being of these “innocent
pregnant women” (CAACH, 2012). In Chino Hills, where 30.3% of the residents were Asian and
only 50.8% were white, this race-based atmosphere of suspicion came as a direct result of the
controversy.7
It is not only citizenship that these women are stealing – Knabe mentioned that maternity
hotels are not regulated and, thus, their owners do not pay taxes to local governments (Chang,
2013a; Sewell, 2013). Mitchell also cited unconfirmed reports that these women took advantage
of what little social welfare the U.S. and California offer to pregnant women. In the most explicit
acknowledgement of U.S. citizenship as racialized private property in these neoliberal times,
Mitchell said of Chinese families who utilize maternity hotels: “They don’t pay taxes, they don’t
assimilate” (Chang, 2012b). This argument is a familiar one in anti-immigration debates. Recall
Natalie Cisneros’ (2013, page 291) report on legislative debates in Tennessee, where state
6
Interview, March 10, 2014.
Population estimates from the 2010 U.S. Census; see
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0613214.html.
7
23
lawmakers accused Mexican women of “multiply[ing]… like rats” to take advantage of
maternity benefits. In these scenarios, the unborn child’s future U.S. citizenship offers some
potential protection. In a scene right out of Lauren Berlant’s “age of fetality” (cited in Cisneros,
2013, page 294), Tennessee healthcare officials – in order to work around certain women’s
potential undocumented status – argued that when they provide maternity care to pregnant
women, they are caring for their unborn children since they “will be classified as U.S. citizen”
regardless of their mothers’ citizenship (page 291).
To humanize their anti-jus soli argument, commentators expressed concerns regarding
the safety of the pregnant women and their children, although neither was able to articulate how
to ensure their safety. For example, a Chinese-American lawyer, citing false advertising, substandard living conditions, and poor care in some maternity hotels, concluded that “If we cannot
stop [Chiense birth tourists] from coming here, then how are we going to make sure that the
American tax payers and the immigration system are not being taken advantage of?” (PBS,
2013). Here, the only policy solution proposed reinforced the anti-immigration rhetoric, where
the multi-prong approach of border control and surveillance and elimination of jus soli reigns
supreme. In contrast, the more moderate and even-tempered approach taken by the Asian Pacific
American Legal Center, which advocated further fact-finding on birth tourism and more
stringent regulation of maternity hotels, received little media coverage (Sewell, 2013).
Mitchell, in an attempt to soften her argument, said, “It’s these businesses who are
exploiting the women. Some of these poor women think they will be taken care of, but
everything is substandard. That’s why elected officials must step up to the plate. We’re not just
dealing with illegal business, we’re dealing with life, human life. Poor babies who are going to
be born in substandard care.” Knabe also commented, “These mothers would have no way of
24
knowing whether they are receiving legitimate birth certificates, and now recourse for any deaths
of injuries… We have to make sure that mothers and babies are in healthy conditions. At the end
of the day that’s what it is about.” Despite this rhetoric, NICH continued to picket with banners
and shouts that focused directly on the “illegal” mothers and their babies, rather than restricting
their protests to the maternity hotel owners. Knabe’s comments were even more galling. If the
real concern is standard of care and false advertising, then policies must be put in place to make
sure that these mothers receive legitimate birth certificates and high quality of care through local
hospitals. But as other comments indicated, that would cause a huge uproar because a legitimate
birth certificate ensures U.S. citizenship, which many – especially the NICH – are vehemently
against. Although the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was not heavily
involved in the Chino Hills case, generally deferring to local authorities and characterizing it as a
zoning (and not immigration) matter, it is not a huge stretch to think that ICE would step up
deportation proceedings to prevent those babies from being born on U.S. soil—as it had done
previously (Hartry, 2012)—if reports of birth tourism intensify in the future.
It is surprising, but not altogether unexpected, that none of the media reports on the
Chino Hills controversy featured Chinese birth tourists or maternity hotel operators. To fill this
gap, I interviewed a Taiwanese couple who operates one of these services out of their suburban
home.8 Howard and Margie are in their early thirties and run a Bed and Breakfast (B&B) in the
San Gabriel Valley. Margie has a student visa and is working toward her bachelor’s degree.
Howard had previously received a work visa through his employer; when it expired and his
employer declined to renew it on his behalf, he decided to remain in the U.S. so he wouldn’t be
separated from Margie and their young son. Since Howard could no longer work legally, they
decided to supplement their income by operating a B&B from their house. Margie had first
8
Interview, March 13, 2014.
25
advertised it through her personal blog, but through word-of-mouth the majority of their clients
on extended stays are pregnant women from China. I met with them after the Chino Hills
controversy had subsided to talk about their perspectives on it.
It was clear that they had been following the immigration debates nationally. Margie, for
instance, contrasted southern California with the “xenophobic” Arizona, while at the same time
distinguishing her clients as different from “Mexicans who cross borders – with or without
papers – to give birth”. They also suggested that there are many reasons for their clients to
choose to come to the U.S., and U.S. citizenship for their child is only one of them (and perhaps
a minor one at best). Margie said that she completely understands why some parents would want
to give birth here in the U.S., but it is no longer like before where the reason was to give their
child a better life. Instead, since the twenty-first century is “the Chinese, or – more broadly – the
Asian, century,” the parents simply want to give their child U.S. citizenship as “another option”
so they can be more competitive in this new world order. This narrative is not the typical
American Dream narrative where the desire is to finally become a fully-fledged U.S. citizen.
Margie in fact saw this as American arrogance when protestors accused pregnant Chinese
mothers as inauthentic Americans using up social welfare. “All my customers pay for everything
– including full hospital bills – in cash; they are being more American than Americans!” In this
re-worked narrative of the American Dream, U.S. citizenship is not quite a subject position but a
commodity. This argument assumes that, of course, to be a proper American citizen is to be a
capitalist, and that the legal category of citizenship increasingly functions like tradable assets
(just as Shachar [2009] and Stevens [2010] had argued).
They were also quick to point out that their B&B differs quite dramatically from the
maternity hotels featured in media reports. Most maternity hotels featured in media reports
26
operated out of apartment complexes in mixed-zoned neighborhoods; those single-family houses
out of residential neighborhoods were relatively rare. Margie suggested that the only reason the
Chino Hills case got so contentious was because Mainland Chinese businessmen were too
aggressive and did not know how to be discreet. Families from Mainland China, “newly rich but
without manners and sophistication,” often got into confrontations with their neighbors because
they behaved badly. As a Taiwanese, Margie’s representation of Mainlanders as backward
people with low suzhi (“quality”) is a popular stereotype, shared by many Hongkongers (Chan,
2014) and even Mainlanders themselves (Fong, 2012; Tomba, 2009).
Somewhat paradoxically, Margie’s attempt to distinguish herself had unwittingly
undermine her own argument. She argued that one reason why Chinese businessmen were
operating these maternity hotels at such a large scale – “renting out blocks of apartments or
motels sometimes” – was because people from Mainland China demand this services now that
they have become affluent, even though earlier she suggested that Chinese(/Asian) economic
dominance made U.S. citizenship dispensable. Specifically, Margie hypothesized that Taiwanese
people, having been the more affluent society for most of the 20th century and already
immigrated to the U.S. in large scale, no longer see U.S. citizenship as so desirable. In fact,
“Taiwanese passport is so easy and convenient to use!,” and affluent Taiwanese parents can
afford to send their kids to the U.S., with or without U.S. citizenship. In contrast, Mainland
China had only just become open and affluent, so getting U.S. citizenship is in vogue. In
Margie’s narrative, which is deeply conditioned by a feeling of Taiwanese cultural superiority
over Mainland China, the economic rise of Mainland China both drives up the demand for U.S.
citizenship and lessens its value.
27
Looking toward media representations of birth tourism from the other side, the recent hit
Chinese movie Finding Mr. Right9 also captures U.S. citizenship’s ambivalence and
contradiction vis-à-vis reproduction, while simultaneously challenges the American Dream
ideology. The movie’s protagonist, Jiajia, is a hsiao san (mistress of a wealthy businessman)
who had to come to the U.S. to give birth, but not because she wants U.S. citizenship for her
child or eventually herself. Instead, due to China’s one-child policy and her status as a hsiao san,
she would not be able to register her child in hukuo (the Chinese household registration system10)
if she had given birth in China. Without hukuo registration, her child cannot access healthcare,
go to school, get a passport, buy a house, etc. Jiajia’s circumstance is contrasted with her
romantic interest Frank, a former surgeon in China who is now a chauffeur for maternity hotel
owners in Seattle. Frank and his wife had moved to the U.S. because their precocious daughter
did not fit in within the rigid Chinese education system. Because his medical license is not
recognized in the U.S. and that her wife makes more money as an executive for a multi-national
pharmaceutical company, Frank became a chauffeur and the primary caretaker for their daughter.
In one particular scene, Jiajia yelled to Frank at a Seattle nightclub, “It doesn’t matter how much
money you have, who would want to travel thousands of miles all alone just to have a baby
without any family around?” During my conversation with Margie, she cited Finding Mr. Right’s
popularity in China (Ma, 2013) and the cultural debates it sparked as evidence of the new
Chinese wealth and desire for U.S. citizenship. Although the movie’s plot does not quite support
Margie’s assertion, it is clear that U.S. citizen-child produced through Chinese birth tourism –
and the political values it represents vis-à-vis the American Dream narrative – resonates
transnationally.
9
The Chinese title translates literally as “Beijing Meets Seattle.”
For a brief overview of the hukou system, see Chan (2009).
10
28
Discussion and conclusion
To reiterate my main argument, it appears that for all parties involved in the Chino Hills
controversy, the fetal child’s U.S. citizen-ness is a crucial component in constructing political
arguments. This is especially apparent when they draw on – and re-work – the familiar narrative
of the American Dream vis-à-vis the citizen-child that is yet to come. Although this paper is only
a preliminary examination of Chinese birth tourism and its role in U.S. immigration politics, it
attempts to answer Mancini and Finlay’s (2008, page 594) call for greater scholarly attention to
not just citizenship, but jus soli specifically. Jus soli is a form of citizenship that is intimately
tied to the territory, and there is an irony in the fact the most territorially bounded understanding
of national citizenship is now a major source of anxiety for states transnationally. The emergence
of Chinese birth tourism as an industry demonstrates how jus soli birthright citizenship,
childbearing, and neoliberalism come together in a struggle for a better future in “America’s
Pacific Century” (Clinton, 2011).
At the same time, charting the course for the future requires taking stock of the past, or,
as David Eng (2010, 22) reminded us, the relegation of certain things into the past (and not
others) is a power-laden move; it absolves us of any complicity in the present. Thus, I want to
place here some signposts for future research that would help mark the Chinese birth tourism in a
broader historical frame and simultaneously a more specific geographical situation. First, is
reproductive futurism simply a new version of an old trick? I think the answer is ‘Yes’ in certain
regards. Reproductive futurism is fundamentally a project of subject formation, so that the child
– or in biopolitical times, the fetus – is now a political subject through which to discipline and
control the parents (e.g., de Leeuw, 2014; Luibhéid, 2013, ch. 3; 2002, ch. 3). The concern that
29
Chino Hills residents and politicians expressed toward the well-being of Chinese women and
their children, then, follows the same historical lineage as forced child removals from Native
Americans and black families in the U.S. under the guise of child and family welfare (Briggs,
2012, part 1). Thus, like the racial history of U.S. (birthright) citizenship I presented in this
paper, geographers should work toward mapping out how child and family welfare function as a
vehicle for state-sanction exclusions (e.g., Martin, 2011; 2012).
Second, this paper demonstrates the need for a much more thorough and fine-grained
ethnography of all the transnational circuits involved in birth tourism and other objects in
immigration debates. In addition to the circuit of migrants themselves, there are numerous other
circuits – of capital, of racial formations, of geopolitics, etc. – and each has its distinct geography
and network. Tracing all of these circuits not only can help us more thoroughly map these
networks and the intermediaries within them, but also allows us to access the power structures
that sustain these networks. For example, asylum lawyers, family friends, ICE officials, and both
formal and information brokers are a couple different types of intermediaries in these
transnational circuits, but they occupy different power positions and have different relations to
this object we call citizenship. Much of my ongoing work is attempting to trace these circuits in
relation to Chinese birth tourism, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ (2004) ethnographies have
provided important methodological framework for this ongoing project. At time of writing
(March 2015), another round of Chinese birth tourism scandal has hit southern California again,
with ICE personnel storming maternity hotels suspected of perpetuating visa fraud (Kim and
Shyong, 2015). Besides coverage in the national media in both the U.S. and China, this story has
been picked up globally in places as far-flung as Colombia (Ximenez de Sandoval, 2015). There
30
needs to be more research on this topic, as most reporting still rely on speculations and
conjectures.
Last but certainly not least, (Chinese) birth tourism appears to be most prominent in
traditional immigration gateway cities like the Los Angeles and New York City metropolitan
areas. Although gateway cities would seem to be ideal for the development of a shadow industry,
given the density of ethnic networks and capital (Cheng, 2013), this spatial trend – if accurate –
goes against the dominant pattern of immigrant settlement in the U.S., which has been moving
away from traditional gateway cities to new immigrant destinations since the 1990s.11 If the story
of contemporary immigration in the U.S. is “new faces in new places” (Massey, 2008), then
Asian migrations today do not follow the script exactly (at least not in specific regions; see Skop
and Li, 2005). Additional demographic and ethnographic research – which is beyond the scope
of this paper – is necessary and absolutely essential to understand (1) What is the pattern of
(Chinese) birth tourism; and (2) How does this pattern influence the construction of regional and
national racial formations.
Despite the need to develop more understanding of the birth tourism phenomenon, I have
shown in this paper (however preliminarily) that birth tourism panic is a historically and
geographically situated product that depends on the racialized reproductive futurism and the antijus soli history in the U.S. Examining the popular rhetoric against these ambiguously American
subjects, and the U.S. state’s fixation on them as an indication of ‘illegal’ immigration, may help
us understand new forms of transnational and American subjectivities. For geographers
interested in immigration and need convincing that social reproduction is important, social
reproduction – quite literally – is at the center of Chinese birth tourism, and reproductive
11
For a brief overview of the literature on new immigrant destinations, see Ellis et al (2014).
31
futurism offers another analytic for examining the construction of political arguments in
immigration debates.
32
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