2010-07-25

Wealthy Chinese travel to U.S. to give birth

Parents deliver US citizenship
The list of benefits runs long for babies born in the US, says Jiang Feng, the Chinese mainland partner of the agency, which originated in Taiwan.

Jiang said babies born in the US will, at the very least, be entitled to a place at an American public university, which is favored by many parents over domestic institutions, both for quality of teaching and cheaper tuition.

"The number of mainland customers has been skyrocketing since we opened the branch in late 2008, right after the US opened tourist visa applications to Chinese individuals," he told China Daily.

Most parents come from affluent families in cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou. Some are motivated by the chance to get US citizenship for their babies, others want to evade China's family planning policy, which restricts most urban couples to one child, he said.

Usually, parents use tourist visas to travel to the US when the pregnancy is in the sixth or seventh month. Typically, they stay for between three and six months, then return with their new arrivals.

Jiang said the agency trains couples to obtain visas and tells them how to handle themselves during US customs interviews.

"I got my visa, as they instructed, and insisted that I wanted to go to the US to travel when I faced the US customs officer," said Wang.

In rare cases, the customs officers might only grant a short stay, such as for one month, according to Jiang.

"But don't worry. The agency is actually experienced in handling that," he said, adding that it has contracted local lawyers who can help people apply for an extended period of stay. He said the waiting period such legal action buys, which is about four or five months, gives mothers enough time to have their babies.

Jiang predicted that more and more mainland parents-to-be will want to have their babies in the US after they learn about the benefits, but he said his agency is already helping about 50 couples a month.
Now the story is getting heavy coverage in China. On Tencent's QQ news page, the subject is covered in "Today's Topic.". The article lists all the benefits for immigrants and how the U.S. treats illegals compared to the situation in Germany. A the bottom is the editorial conclusion, that Chinese cannot really blame these people for following the American Dream. There's also a link to an article discussing the China Dream versus the American Dream.

Many Chinese do condemn those people as unpatriotic. And in the U.S., many people see this situation as a small part of an insane immigration policy.
Solid gold anchor babies
You can tell how great something is by the number of people stuffed within its boundaries, not by how many people are lined up waiting to get in (don't even think about that). That's why Arizona State is the most prestigious university in the country: because it has 67,082 students. That makes Arizona St. much more prestigious than piddling little colleges like Harvard and Caltech. (Of course, Arizona St. has a long way to go to catch up in prestige with the Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad, Pakistan, enrollment three million.)

Conversely, the Augusta National Golf Club made Bill Gates wait for years to become a member despite Warren Buffett sponsoring him, so who'd want to belong to Augusta? There's probably some golf club in Calcutta that has three million members and they each get one teetime per lifetime (but you get an additional teetime per reincarnation, so you've got that going for you, which is nice), and thus it would be much better to belong to Calcutta Municipal than empty old Augusta National.
Immigration and national identity will remain hot topics during the decline in social mood.

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