Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump exaggerates claims of Chinese birth tourism, Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes two military officers, and China tests a long-range missile.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump exaggerates claims of Chinese birth tourism, Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes two military officers, and China tests a long-range missile.

Refuting Trump’s Birth Tourism Claims

The U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the Trump administration’s bid to overturn birthright citizenship has revived a familiar strain of racist fearmongering: U.S. President Donald Trump and other Republicans have suggested that so-called birth tourism from China is a government-backed scheme to plant foreign agents on U.S. soil.

Though birth tourism—in which a foreign-born mother travels to the United States to give birth to a child who does not remain as a U.S. resident—is technically illegal, it is a real industry. But it is nowhere near as large as critics make it out to be.

There is no official data on birth tourism, but at its peak in 2015, it is estimated to have represented less than 0.3 percent of all U.S. births. In recent years, some 7,000 to 9,000 instances of birth tourism occurred annually in the United States, the overwhelming majority of which were children born to Hispanic mothers, mostly from Mexico.

Of these, births to nonresident Chinese mothers in the United States are estimated in the low hundreds each year. Another small group consists of Chinese women on longer-term temporary visas, primarily students, who spend years in the United States. Around 27,000 children per year are born to mothers who were themselves born in China, but most of those mothers are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

The number of births to undocumented immigrants is higher than the birth tourism rate—about 9 percent of U.S. births in 2023—but also overwhelmingly represented........

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