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.

The Most Racist Tour Guide in San Francisco

Disgruntled guide tells tourists "F*ck Chinatown" on her apparent last day on the job.



Got this video passed along to me and... wow. Just.. wow.

Here's one seriously disgruntled San Francisco tour guide losing her shit and going off on a nasty, racist rant about everything she hates about Chinatown. She apparently decided to commemorate her last day on the job by going for a ride, cracking open a beer, getting on the mic and letting everyone know how she felt.

The video, shot by a German tourist on one of those double decker bus things, features the unidentified tour guide going off on a F-bomb-laden litany of her least favorite things about Chinatown. "Fuck your horse tail. Fuck your ginseng. Fuck your little hair salons where nobody in there knows how to fucking speak English. Fuck this bullshit. Fuck your Chinatown gates..." and so on, and so forth.

Greek police are rounding up (and sometimes beating the crap out of) "foreign"-looking people

Some disturbing news from abroad... In Greece, police are apparently now hell-bent on apprehending undocumented immigrants, launching a new operation to check the papers of people who look "foreign." Yup, that means they're rounding up everybody who's anything other than a shade of white.

But when you indiscriminately start checking the papers of everybody who looks different, the cops are inevitably going to nab legitimate visitors in their sweeps, including a South Korean tourist who was beaten in an incident over his identification: The tourists held by Greek police as illegal migrants.

This incident involving Korean backpacker Hyun Young Jung went down several months ago, and has since escalated into a major international incident and huge PR fail for Greece:

Taiwanese will no longer need visas to visit U.S.

Interesting. Looks like Taiwan just joined the official list of America's buddies. Starting Thursday, Taiwanese citizens will no longer need a visa to visit the United States, making it much easier for tourists and relatives to make the trip: Taiwanese will no longer need visas to visit U.S.

Taiwan joins a list 37 visa waiver countries, which includes Japan and South Korea. This means Taiwanese travelers will no longer have to wait in line at the U.S. Consulate in Taipei or pay a $164 fee and convince an interviewer that they will return home. Generally, it's just going to be a much smaller pain in the ass for Taiwanese folks to visit the U.S.: