The young Japanese Midori Nishida was preparing to board a flight to Saipan, an American island in the Pacific Ocean, in Hong Kong, to visit her parents when the airline imposed an unusual requirement: she had to take a pregnancy test if she wanted to travel .
The airline, Hong Kong Express Airways, forced the 25-year-old woman to declare that she was not actually pregnant. In addition, he was asked to authorize a medical provider to perform a “fit to fly” evaluation, with the aim of detecting if he had a body silhouette similar to that of a pregnant woman.
Finally, according to The Wall Street Journal, air personnel escorted the woman to a restroom for a pregnancy test.
The airline has said that these measures are due to “the concerns raised by the authorities in Saipan”, where the so-called birth tourism resulted in more babies born to tourists in 2018 than to residents.
This territory of the Marianas archipelago has about 50,000 inhabitants and a status similar to the island of Guam or Puerto Rico, which allows us to obtain American nationality by birth automatically.
Hong Kong Express Airways also specified that the pregnancy test was intended to "help ensure that United States immigration laws are not undermined," according to the newspaper cited.
The airline has suspended this practice and has apologized to the affected passengers, whose number and identity is unknown.
A growing childbirth tourism
Babies born in US territory automatically receive citizenship of the country.
In 2018, 575 Chinese women were born on this island, which is the only U.S. territory that these citizens can enter without a visa. In comparison, in 2019 there were only 19, presumably due to the measures implemented by the local government.
The US authorities do not keep a record of the women who come to the country every year to give birth to children who will automatically have citizenship, but a Chinese association in this sector estimated that there have been 10,000 tourists from that country since 2012, the cited daily.
The president, Donald Trump, has said he is seriously examining the possibility of ending the right to citizenship by birth, which he considers "frankly ridiculous."
In addition, he has described the so-called anchor babies (because they can then bring another family member to the country, although they must be 18 years old) of “a magnet for illegal immigration”. This right is, however, enshrined in the Constitution, and legal experts consider it very unlikely that the president alone can eliminate it.
The so-called childbirth tourism is not a crime, but it does carry irregularities that can be judged criminally.
In respect of immigration law violations
In January 2019, three people operating billionaire businesses of this type in southern California were arrested in the largest federal criminal investigation to date.
The companies trained their clients to deceive immigration officials, paying fees as if they were people without resources in the hospitals where the babies were born despite the fact that many were rich, according to the researchers.
Some Chinese couples charged up to $ 100,000 for childbirth tourism package, which included accommodation, babysitters and luxury shopping excursions.
The accusations in that case include visa fraud, electronic fraud and identity theft, among others.
Mark Zito, a special Customs agent in Los Angeles, told The New York Times that investigators also found evidence of similar activities by Russians (focusing on the Northeast of the country or South Florida) and Nigerians (in Texas).
"We are trying to placate him, but he is increasing," said Zito, "other nations have begun to take advantage of this."
(Edited by Ivette Leyva)
