(DCNF)—Some Republican lawmakers are sounding the alarm over birth tourism amid rising national security and fraud concerns.
The phrase birth tourism refers to the act of foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. to give birth and obtain citizenship for their children. Experts and lawmakers warned the Daily Caller News Foundation that these schemes pose major threats to national security and can impose undue cost burdens on American taxpayers.
“The birth tourism industry engages in fraud and other criminal activity, threatens our national security, and costs U.S. taxpayers,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer told the DCNF in a statement. “Our Committee’s Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses recently exposed this problem when the CEO of an entity promoting birth tourism repeatedly invoked the Fifth when questioned about his practices.”
“Another witness detailed how foreign nationals engaged in birth tourism exploit our immigration laws and drain taxpayer-funded resources,” Comer continued. “The Oversight Committee, alongside the Trump administration, will continue to fight these illegal practices, hold those responsible accountable, and restore integrity to our immigration system.”
In May, the Oversight Committee announced it was probing several firms for allegedly engaging in birth tourism. The committee’s Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses also held a hearing on Sept. 1 which scrutinized “the prevalence of birth tourism schemes” across the nation.
“Being a citizen of the United States of America represents full legal membership in the great American experiment,” Republican Texas Rep. Brandon Gill said during the hearing. “But the concept of birthright citizenship is being exploited by foreign nationals, including those from adversarial nations like the People’s Republic of China and Russia.”
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 22,000 to 26,000 babies are born annually in the U.S. via birth tourism, but notes that government data suggests that there were just 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses as of 2024.
Birth tourism to the U.S. is practiced by individuals from across the world, including citizens of China, Taiwan, Korea, Nigeria, Turkey, Russia, Brazil and Mexico, according to a January 2020 fact sheet from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Some of these individuals misrepresent the purpose of their trip to circumvent scrutiny, CIS reported.
“Birth tourism could result in people raised in foreign countries opposed to America being able to enter America at will, spy on this country and vote in our elections,” Federation for American Immigration Reform deputy general counsel Chris Hajec told the DCNF.
“Birth tourism is likely to decline, because, following the Supreme Court’s decision [on birthright citizenship], greater efforts will be made to prevent it, such as enforcing a policy of not issuing tourist visas to pregnant women, or banning birth tourism hospitals,” Hajec added.
The Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to deny automatic birthright citizenship to U.S. born children with two foreign national parents violated the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause.
Trump subsequently issued an Aug. 6 executive order aiming to eliminate birth tourism, stating that “the immigration laws of the United States establish discrete categories of temporary nonimmigrant visas to allow foreign visitors into the United States for study, exchange, temporary employment, tourism, and other transitory activities that are now exploited by birth tourism operators.”
The State Department announced in August that it is launching a new task force aiming to crack down on birth tourism that will review “the activities of visa holders worldwide to identify instances of birth tourism, take action to revoke visas of those who engage in or facilitate it, and dismantle the networks that profit from this abuse.”
Birth tourism can also place additional strain on healthcare and public services, potentially placing the well-being and safety of citizens and lawful U.S. residents at risk, according to The Law Offices of Spar & Bernstein, P.C.
A U.S. embassy in West Africa discovered a “sophisticated” birth tourism network of more than 100 foreign nationals using fabricated documents to obtain visas to acquire U.S. citizenship for their children, per a June press release.
Texas has recently moved to crack down on alleged birth tourism schemes. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an order in July directing state agencies to probe birth tourism and “hold every provider that facilitates them accountable.”
In late June, Republican Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles unveiled legislation to stop birth tourism in the U.S., saying in a statement that “foreigners have embedded themselves into our society and are being trained by foreign governments to corrupt our culture.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
