Carly Fiorina, too, says "industry" of Chinese women giving birth in America is a "festering problem"

Another Republican presidential candidate gets in on this week's China-bashing.



Not content to sit back and let Jeb Bush or Donald Trump have all the Asian-bashing fun, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina got in on the racist, xenophobic scapegoating with a rather unoriginal rant against the allegedly rampant problem of Chinese women engaging in so-called "birth tourism."

Carly Fiorina rails against 'industry' of Chinese women having US babies

Our nation faces so many problems. Where do we even begin? When in doubt -- and way behind in the polls -- blame the Chinese. On Thursday, Fiorina reiterated rival Jeb Bush's claims about "an industry that has been set up in L.A. where Chinese women come over on a tourist visa and have a baby."

Asian Birth Tourism, Numbers In Perspective

By Karthick Ramakrishnan. Cross-posted from AAPI Data.


Photo Credit: New York Times
In a recent press conference, Jeb Bush clumsily (and erroneously) said that the phenomenon of so-called "anchor babies" was "frankly, more related to Asian people."

As others have noted, the phenomenon of birth tourism is distinct from most conventional understandings of the offensive term "anchor baby," which tends to imply that people use birthright citizenship from their children to avoid deportation or eventually gain U.S. citizenship for themselves.

There has been a fair amount of sensationalist reporting on birth tourism by Chinese immigrants, with little understanding of the number of estimated "birth tourists," and how they compare to the overall number of Chinese immigrants or visitors to the United States. Below, we provide some numbers in perspective.