oldfort, the baby is born in USA so gets a USA passport to go to China. In order to get a Chinese passport/citizenship, the baby/parents have to renounce US citizenship to get Chinese citizenship. China will not issue the passport without giving up the other citizenship. When the child then applies for a US passport as an adult, it should come up that he previously had a passport, renounced citizenship, so is no longer a US citizen. Does it always work that way? These babies are not yet adults, so we don’t know.
When my Chinese child became a US citizen, China revoked her citizenship. If she travels back, she needs a visa.
Canada is like most countries in the Americas (including the US and Mexico and most countries in Central America and South America) where birth within the country’s territory confers citizenship, with exceptions involving at least one parent having diplomatic status and neither parent having citizenship or permanent residency.
Outside the Americas, this is uncommon, though it exists in a few places like Pakistan and Lesotho. Persons born in Australia get Australian citizenship only if at least one parent is an Australian citizen or permanent resident, or the person lives in Australia until his/her 10th birthday.
^^ Not at all. Most of the Canadian Chinese immigrants came from Hong Kong pre-1997. I don’t know what numbers are now coming from the PRC. In NYC and Southern CA, the mainland immigrants are a significant portion of the Chinese-American population.
^ People generally like to move to an “advanced” country, especially when they are already reasonably rich in the country of their origin.
However, in history, it seems sometimes people may get rich by going to a not-so-very-rich (but maybe dirt-poor) countries. This is especially true in the colony/imperial days. (Last weekends, I read a book in which the author claims that the country like British made a lot of money by being the largest drug dealer in history - doing so “legally” as well.) But it is totally another question whether it is unethical/greedy to do so.
I do not agree at “birth tourism”. But it is still not as horrible as what the more developed countries did to other countries who were late in their development a century ago.
I heard that in the end many of that generation of immigrants lost money , big time, by doing so. But, hey, they were rich so they could afford this “bad” financial move.
I’ve been pondering this statement for the last couple of days. I think the distinction has more to do w circumstances rather than w nationality.
“Birth tourism” is distinguished by the women coming on a visa, delivering the baby on US soil, then all of them going back to the mother’s motherland. I have quite a few expat colleagues who did a foreign work assignment in the US, had a baby on US soil, then all leave the US to move on to the next foreign work assignment. These colleagues have been of all different of nationalities.
An “anchor baby” is a situation where the mother comes (visa is optional), delivers the baby on US soil, then continues to stay illegally to raise child in the US. This is usually accompanied by complaints that the parent’s deportation would constitute a human rights abuse because it would tear apart the family. Though, it’s not clear why the option of them all going back to the mother’s motherland (like the birth tourists) never enters into the picture.
Another aspect of this phenomenon is that the parents may want to give their offsprings advantages over the peers of their offsprings. Learning English well and having more global experiences in an advanced country are highly valued in their country of origin. Some may want to get away from their high pressure education system as well. No parents want to see their children suffer like that in their secondary education.
There is also a phenomenon called goose family: Usually the father stayed behind and the mother and the child came to US solely for the education purpose.
There were many Korean goose families at my kids’ former international school. What distinguishes the goose kids (goslings?) in the US and overseas from anchor babies is that they and their parent are residing in the country legally.
The Koreans even have subcategories of goose families.
Wow…I do not think I could manage separations of 20 years and regard it as a “normal sacrifice and no big deal.”
I once read an article about a father in China: This father had some curable disease which would cost a lot of money for its treatment. He decided to commit suicide after he had learned that his son who studied at a boarding school in another province had got into a “good” college. He wanted to save whatever money their family had had for his child’s college education.
I could imagine my grandparents might do something “horrible” like this, but not my parents. My grandfather had had a cataract problem for his eyes for his last 20 years of his life and refused to accept a treatment. He essentially lived in an almost blind condition for his last 10 years of life. I remember I had to cut the nails for him as a child (not many times though) as his vision was too poor.