Fetal Citizens Birthright Citizenship, Reproductive Futurism, and the Panic over Chinese Birth Tourism in Southern California

Fetal Citizens? Birthright Citizenship, Reproductive Futurism, and the Panic over Chinese Birth Tourism in Southern California Working draft in preparation for submission to Environment and Planning D: Society and Space special section, “Race, Biopolitics, and the Future” DO NOT CITE/DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION Sean H Wang Department of Geography Syracuse University 144 Eggers Hall Syracuse, NY 13244-1020 shwang13@syr.edu Fetal Citizens? Birthright Citizenship, Reproductive Futurism, and the Panic over Chinese Birth Tourism in Southern California Abstract: In September, 2012, residents of Chino Hills, California - a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles in San Bernardino County - exposed a maternity hotel disguised as a hillside mansion in their city Part of an emergent shadow industry of birth tourism, this maternity hotel catered to pregnant Chinese women who traveled to the United States to give birth to their children This controversy received wide-spread media attention, as organized resident protests against this maternity hotel argued that Chinese birth tourism represents an immigration loophole, where foreigners were taking advantage of the jus soli birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution This paper analyzes media reports and interview transcripts after the Chino Hills controversy in order to understand how debates about Chinese birth tourism after the controversy Chino Hills became a lightning rod in anti-immigration debates nationally Drawing from Lee Edelman's (2004) concept of reproductive futurism and Eithne Luibhéid's (2013) application of it to theorize migration controls, this paper argues for all parties involved in these debates mobilized the figure of the (fetal) child and her U.S citizen-ness in the future to construct their political arguments Thus, not only does the panic over Chinese birth tourism constitute a racialized violence where the history of anti-Asian fear is resurrected, it ironically forces certain migrant women to resort to a pro-life defense in order to secure a right that ought to be universal for all women - that is, the right to give birth under safe conditions without threat of deportation Keywords: birthright citizenship, reproductive futurism, birth tourism, immigration, transnational family, China In September 2012, residents of Chino Hills, California—an extremely wealthy suburb in San Bernardino County—reported a sewage spill from a hillside mansion According to media reports, first by a local newspaper, then by the Los Angeles Times, and finally by national media outlets like the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and FOX News, local residents had been suspicious of the goings-on at this mansion for a long time because people who lived there did not seem friendly and kept to themselves With the sewage spill and the subsequent code inspection, the mansion was exposed as a ‘maternity hotel’ The owner had subdivided the house into numerous rooms to accommodate more than ten Chinese women at a time He had installed a commercial-grade kitchen and hired cooks and nurses to look after the women staying there, waiting to give birth (PBS, 2013) When code violations are found, a citation is usually issued and the investigation ends once the building is brought up to code However, a few Chino Hills residents, upon learning about this code violation citation, picketed the mansion for what they saw as an instance of ‘illegal immigration’ They argued that these pregnant women and their families took advantage of the U.S Constitution to secure citizenship for their children—so-called ‘anchor babies’—and, eventually, their entire extended family After forming a group called “Not in Chino Hills!” (NICH), these residents began lobbying local politicians to address this supposed immigration loophole NICH members flooded municipal and regional council meetings in the San Gabriel Valley, voicing their concerns about welfare-cheating and burdens on taxpayers to local governments Their civic participation prompted Los Angeles County Councilman, Don Knabe, to set up a multi-agency taskforce to look into this issue The Los Angeles Times ran a series of 16 articles on the Chino Hills controversy By July 2013, the maternity hotel in Chino Hills was abandoned The Chino Hills controversy appears to be an isolated instance involving a particular tactic of transnational family formation (Ho, 2008), but it is in fact part of a global ‘birth tourism’ industry, sustained by complex transnational assemblages (e.g., Lindquist et al, 2012) and made possible by jus soli (right of the soil) birthright citizenship laws Usually considered a form of medical tourism, birth tourism (or ‘maternity tourism’) describes the practice where pregnant women cross international borders to receive maternity care and give birth (Connell, 2013; Roberts and Scheper-Hughes, 2011) Although motivations behind birth tourism vary, many opponents point to the lure of citizenship or legal status for either expectant mothers or their children as a significant pull factor Dubbed ‘citizenship tourism’, these cases occur globally in places including Ireland (White and Gilmartin, 2008), the U.K (Bewley et al, 2014; Gilligan, 2013), Canada (Wong, 2014; Sibley, 2013), Hong Kong (Craven, 2012), and the U.S and its territories (Coleman, 2013) Although small in number compared to immigrant populations at large, alleged instances of citizenship tourism have figured prominently in recent citizenship debates in both Canada and the U.S (Mas, 2014; Jacobson, 2010) In southern California, birth tourism—as practiced informally through transnational kinship networks—is well known to residents In recent years, however, incidents like the Chino Hills controversy suggest the emergence of an organized shadow industry that has commercialized birth tourism (though its size is exaggerated by sensationalist reporting; Medina, 2011) In particular, birth tourism has become a lightning rod in state-wide fights over ‘illegal immigration’, where anti-immigration politicians and activists have argued that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution, which grants citizenship on the jus soli basis, is driving birth tourism to the U.S and should be abolished This claim is often made with offensive and incendiary language, describing pregnant migrant women—especially Latinas—as “multiplying rats” (Cisneros, 2013, page 291) and their children as “anchor babies” (Lederer, 2013; Ignatow and Williams, 2011) Through these political debates over birthright citizenship, a nascent racial politics is emerging in the U.S Asians and Latinos are both perceived as threats, but Latinos are seen as stereotypical poor migrants strategizing to remain in the U.S (Tobar, 2011), while Asians are seen as using their financial clout to buy their way in instead (Lu, 2014; Beech, 2013) As one Californian anti-immigration activist put it, whether Mexican anchor babies or Chinese birth tourism, “[i]t’s invasion by birth canal” (Templeton, 2010) As the Chino Hills controversy demonstrates, birth tourism is not simply a product of jus soli citizenship laws but rather a nexus of citizenship regimes, global migrations, and racial formations (Roberts, 1997), and the panic it induced a form of racialized violence that augments reproductive futurism’s role in securing the nation (Luibhéid, 2013) Although xenophobic responses in the Chino Hills controversy are just another episode in the longue durée of antiAsian fear in the U.S (Tchen and Yeats, 2014), birth tourism emerges for particular reasons during these biopolitical times The focus on the (fetal) child and her U.S citizenship—both as a supposed pull-factor for Chinese migration to the U.S and a mark of inauthentic American identity—demonstrates that the different routes to citizenship and the temporality of political subject formation are essential in understanding contemporary immigration debates in the U.S In this paper, I will introduce the role of birthright citizenship in immigration politics, and draw on the concept of reproductive futurism to understand how immigration politics is worked through the figure of the (fetal) citizen-child in birth tourism panics In subsequent sections, I draw on analysis of media reports during the Chino Hills controversy and my own preliminary fieldwork to show how reproductive futurism is mobilized by both opponents and proponents/practitioners of birth tourism to stake their political claims as proper American citizens Birthright citizenship and the history of racial exclusions in the U.S The key argument mobilized against birth tourism is that it is a tactic that exploits a supposed immigration loophole, that by giving birth in the U.S., the entire family could secure U.S citizenship Even though this argument ignores a litany of complications—including the waiting time between the child’s birth and her twenty-first birthday (which is the earliest she could sponsor her direct kin for permanent residency), and little to no evidence that U.S citizenship is the primary pull-factor for migration—anti-immigration politicians and activists have argued that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution, which grants citizenship on a jus soli basis, is driving birth tourism to the U.S and should be abolished The Chino Hills controversy—and the subsequent political organizing by NICH—is a particular instance where certain forms of families and their practices have come into conflict with, and struggled against, regulations based on legal categories of citizenship In this section, I will survey the history of jus soli birthright citizenship in the U.S in order to situate current efforts to repeal it Citizenship has only been a prominent research theme in geography since the 1990s, but work on it has proliferated to the point where a recent review likened it to Waldo of the Where’s Waldo? fame, that geographers’ “incessant search for [citizenship] makes [it] seem simultaneously illusive and ubiquitous” (Staeheli, 2010, page 393) Indeed, a cursory search of the geographic literature reveals an explosion in the number of books and articles with citizenship as a keyword, and special issues on citizenship appear almost annually (e.g., Painter and Philo, 1995; Staeheli, 2003; Desforges et al, 2005; Kurtz and Hankins, 2005; Dickinson et al, 2008) Most scholarship on citizenship traces its conceptual origins to the Greco-Roman era, when being a citizen entails formal belonging to a polity where participation in the public decision-making is a right (Painter and Philo, 1995; Isin, 2012) This conceptual lineage is reinforced in the rise of liberalism, linking citizenship to the inception of modern nation-states (Marston and Mitchell, 2004) In this model, citizenship binds an individual to a nation-state, to which he is afforded a set of rights but also must fulfill a set of obligations (Bauböck, 2010; Ho, 2008) Although citizenship traditionally has been the domain of political theory, geography has made significant contributions to its study in a short period of time In particular, geographers have been at the forefront of expanding citizenship’s conceptual reach by emphasizing its extralegal dimensions Feminist geographers, for example, have revealed the seemingly genderneutral figure of the citizen to be a myth, detailing how citizenship as a formal category is built on masculinist assumptions and a strict enforcement of the public/private divide (Marston, 1990) Others have traced citizenship’s exclusionary elements from its origin in the Greco-Roman period, where women, non-property owners, and slaves were excluded, to its contemporary manifestations where access to citizenship remains unequal and uneven in the U.S and globally (Glenn, 2000; Varsanyi, 2008; Tyler, 2010) Citizenship, these scholars argue collectively, rests on liberalism’s paradox: “[o]nly by curtailing the liberty of individuals who fall outside a given nation-state can the liberty of those within be guaranteed” (Bloemraad et al, 2008, page 164) Geographers studying citizenship, sensitive to the necessity of grounding theories to particular places and scales, have predominantly focused their attention on how citizenship’s exclusionary elements manifest in everyday life (e.g., Ehrkamp and Leitner, 2003; Secor, 2004; Conlon, 2010) Within this large geographic literature on citizenship, birthright citizenship is a topic that has only just begun receiving attention and only in a cursory manner (e.g., Isin, 2012; Bauder, 2014; White and Gilmartin, 2008) In contrast, birthright citizenship has been—and remains—a prominent object of inquiry in political theory and cognate disciplines like sociology and legal studies (e.g., Menzel, 2013; Volpp, 2011; Ngai, 2007) This relative neglect, I suggest, precisely stems from geographers’ tendency to ground studies of citizenship in everyday life Barnett and Low (2004, page 9) had critiqued geographers for preferring scales of analysis that “tend to be both above and below the nation-state” (see also Desforges et al, 2005, page 440) Borrowing Castles and Davidson’s (2000) distinction, most geographic studies of citizenship focus on the experiences of “being a citizen” at the expense of exploring processes of “becoming a citizen”, especially their formal, legal dimensions This distinction is to some degree a false one It is obvious that the route through which one becomes a citizen, or even one’s (in)ability to become a citizen, has a direct impact on one’s everyday experience of being a citizen; there is an abundance of scholarship on undocumented Latino migrants in the U.S., for example, that demonstrates the intertwined nature of the two analytical categories above (e.g., Varsanyi, 2006) Nonetheless, I insist here that geographers, while retaining their focus on the grounded experiences of citizenship, should pay greater attention to birthright citizenship and, more broadly, various legal mechanisms of becoming a citizen Chinese birth tourism and the Chino Hills controversy demonstrate the analytical utility of “becoming a citizen.” If geographers recognize that “laws are social production at its most literal” (Cresswell, 2006, page 158) and take legal categories as the starting point of analysis, then it is possible to frame both the Chinese’s supposed desire for U.S citizenship and southern California residents’ protests as part of the same multi-scalar struggle over what are the appropriate national membership criteria (e.g., Bauder, 2012; Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, 2002); in other words, who can be counted as a legitimate U.S citizen Although NICH’s protests took place in their neighborhoods, the very object being fought over is about national citizenship and belonging Hence, focusing on diverse routes toward becoming a citizen allows for a multi-scalar analysis that does not eschew national-level politics Another reason why geographers should pay greater attention to legal categories of citizenship is that they allow us to historicize seemingly contemporary struggles over citizenship criteria This issue is particularly salient in the Chino Hills controversy, as the main group (the Chinese) and the main institution (jus soli birthright citizenship) under attack have an intertwined and, at times, contradictory history solidified in the various Chinese Exclusion Acts since 1884 (not repealed until 1943) and the 1898 Supreme Court ruling in United States v Wong Kim Ark In these two events, particular ideas about race and immigration crystallized in—and were continually reinforced through—jus soli birthright citizenship in the U.S What follows in the rest of this section is my attempt at a cursory trace of this intertwining legacy to the contemporary debates over repealing jus soli in the U.S Historian Mae Ngai has written perhaps the definitive history on the intersection of race and immigration laws prior to 1965 (Ngai, 1999; 2005) Here I focus on a more recent article (Ngai, 2007) in which she articulated the historical and contemporary connections between antiAsian racism and jus soli birthright citizenship in the U.S Although jus soli has been in practice since the founding of the United States, it was only available to white Americans The Fourteenth Amendment, one of the Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S Constitution, formally enshrined jus soli primarily so that former slaves and their descendants could access U.S citizenship (see also Molina, 2014) However, legal questions remained whether Asians born on U.S soil would apply under the Fourteenth Amendment, given that various exclusionary legislations had made Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship (Ngai, 1999) This matter was not settled until 1898, when the U.S Supreme Court ruled in United States v Wong Kim Ark that the Fourteenth Amendment did indeed apply to all persons born on U.S soil, irrespective of whether said persons were eligible for citizenship (via naturalization) based on racial exclusions (see also Hartry, 2012) Despite this legal victory, various racial exclusions from immigration and naturalization remained in force and served “as constant pressures against realization of full citizenship rights of the native-born” (Ngai, 2007, page 2529) Ngai characterized the anti-jus soli campaigns as a logical extension of racial exclusions Commenting on the pre-Wong Kim Ark political rhetoric, she wrote, “The anti-Chinese nativists understood that granting citizenship to the children of Chinese assured permanent settlement and an accretion of the Chinese population, thereby undermining the very objectives of exclusion” (Ngai, 2007, page 2528) More than a century later, the same rhetoric of securing the future nation against racial contagions continues to animate anti-jus soli campaigns (Oliviero, 2013; Tormey, 2007) and anti-immigration more generally (e.g., Cisneros, 2008) This theme is one that I will pick up again in the next section under the lens of reproductive futurism Contemporary anti-jus soli campaigns in the U.S generally draw their legitimacy from Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith’s (1985) Citizenship Without Consent, in which the two legal scholars argued that the Fourteenth Amendment should not apply to children of ‘aliens’ in the U.S Jus soli, they argued, is a feudal remnant from the English common law that had no place in a republic, where citizenship is based on consent Accordingly, the Fourteenth Amendment is only applicable to those “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and, contra-Wong Kim Ark, the jurisdiction in question is a political one based on consent and not a territorial one Schuck and Smith’s interpretation has been roundly criticized by various constitutional law experts (Aber and Small, 2013, page 82), and Smith himself offered a (grudging) reversal in 2009 (CullitonGonzalez, 2012, page 142) A thorough legal rebuttal of Schuck and Smith’s argument is beyond the scope here; instead, following Ngai, I will highlight how the issue of consent can be framed differently when one historicizes birthright citizenship Schuck and Smith were concerned that jus soli represents a route that assigns citizenship without consent of the polity; in other words, it is a form of “ascriptive” citizenship In their view, the consent of the polity is secured when one is recognized by the state, and voluntarily consents to being recognized, as a citizen Thus, undocumented migrants, having unlawfully entered U.S territories, not have the state’s consent and are not subject to its jurisdiction Ngai quite strongly argued, however, that “the racial history of citizenship reveals the principle of mutual consent to be a myth” (Ngai, 2007, page 2529) Opponents of jus soli ignore that both 10 maternity benefits In these scenarios, the unborn child’s future U.S citizenship offers some potential protection In a scene right out of Lauren Berlant’s “age of fetality” (cited in Cisneros, 2013, page 294), Tennessee healthcare officials – in order to work around certain women’s potential undocumented status – argued that when they provide maternity care to pregnant women, they are caring for their unborn children since they “will be classified as U.S citizen” regardless of their mothers’ citizenship (page 291) To humanize their anti-jus soli argument, commentators expressed concerns regarding the safety of the pregnant women and their children, although neither was able to articulate how to ensure their safety For example, a Chinese-American lawyer, citing false advertising, substandard living conditions, and poor care in some maternity hotels, concluded that “If we cannot stop [Chiense birth tourists] from coming here, then how are we going to make sure that the American tax payers and the immigration system are not being taken advantage of?” (PBS, 2013) Here, the only policy solution proposed reinforced the anti-immigration rhetoric, where the multi-prong approach of border control and surveillance and elimination of jus soli reigns supreme In contrast, the more moderate and even-tempered approach taken by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, which advocated further fact-finding on birth tourism and more stringent regulation of maternity hotels, received little media coverage (Sewell, 2013) Mitchell, in an attempt to soften her argument, said, “It’s these businesses who are exploiting the women Some of these poor women think they will be taken care of, but everything is substandard That’s why elected officials must step up to the plate We’re not just dealing with illegal business, we’re dealing with life, human life Poor babies who are going to be born in substandard care.” Knabe also commented, “These mothers would have no way of knowing whether they are receiving legitimate birth certificates, and now recourse for any deaths 24 of injuries… We have to make sure that mothers and babies are in healthy conditions At the end of the day that’s what it is about.” Despite this rhetoric, NICH continued to picket with banners and shouts that focused directly on the “illegal” mothers and their babies, rather than restricting their protests to the maternity hotel owners Knabe’s comments were even more galling If the real concern is standard of care and false advertising, then policies must be put in place to make sure that these mothers receive legitimate birth certificates and high quality of care through local hospitals But as other comments indicated, that would cause a huge uproar because a legitimate birth certificate ensures U.S citizenship, which many – especially the NICH – are vehemently against Although the U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was not heavily involved in the Chino Hills case, generally deferring to local authorities and characterizing it as a zoning (and not immigration) matter, it is not a huge stretch to think that ICE would step up deportation proceedings to prevent those babies from being born on U.S soil—as it had done previously (Hartry, 2012)—if reports of birth tourism intensify in the future It is surprising, but not altogether unexpected, that none of the media reports on the Chino Hills controversy featured Chinese birth tourists or maternity hotel operators To fill this gap, I interviewed a Taiwanese couple who operates one of these services out of their suburban home.8 Howard and Margie are in their early thirties and run a Bed and Breakfast (B&B) in the San Gabriel Valley Margie has a student visa and is working toward her bachelor’s degree Howard had previously received a work visa through his employer; when it expired and his employer declined to renew it on his behalf, he decided to remain in the U.S so he wouldn’t be separated from Margie and their young son Since Howard could no longer work legally, they decided to supplement their income by operating a B&B from their house Margie had first advertised it through her personal blog, but through word-of-mouth the majority of their clients Interview, March 13, 2014 25 on extended stays are pregnant women from China I met with them after the Chino Hills controversy had subsided to talk about their perspectives on it It was clear that they had been following the immigration debates nationally Margie, for instance, contrasted southern California with the “xenophobic” Arizona, while at the same time distinguishing her clients as different from “Mexicans who cross borders – with or without papers – to give birth” They also suggested that there are many reasons for their clients to choose to come to the U.S., and U.S citizenship for their child is only one of them (and perhaps a minor one at best) Margie said that she completely understands why some parents would want to give birth here in the U.S., but it is no longer like before where the reason was to give their child a better life Instead, since the twenty-first century is “the Chinese, or – more broadly – the Asian, century,” the parents simply want to give their child U.S citizenship as “another option” so they can be more competitive in this new world order This narrative is not the typical American Dream narrative where the desire is to finally become a fully-fledged U.S citizen Margie in fact saw this as American arrogance when protestors accused pregnant Chinese mothers as inauthentic Americans using up social welfare “All my customers pay for everything – including full hospital bills – in cash; they are being more American than Americans!” In this re-worked narrative of the American Dream, U.S citizenship is not quite a subject position but a commodity This argument assumes that, of course, to be a proper American citizen is to be a capitalist, and that the legal category of citizenship increasingly functions like tradable assets (just as Shachar [2009] and Stevens [2010] had argued) They were also quick to point out that their B&B differs quite dramatically from the maternity hotels featured in media reports Most maternity hotels featured in media reports operated out of apartment complexes in mixed-zoned neighborhoods; those single-family houses 26 out of residential neighborhoods were relatively rare Margie suggested that the only reason the Chino Hills case got so contentious was because Mainland Chinese businessmen were too aggressive and did not know how to be discreet Families from Mainland China, “newly rich but without manners and sophistication,” often got into confrontations with their neighbors because they behaved badly As a Taiwanese, Margie’s representation of Mainlanders as backward people with low suzhi (“quality”) is a popular stereotype, shared by many Hongkongers (Chan, 2014) and even Mainlanders themselves (Fong, 2012; Tomba, 2009) Somewhat paradoxically, Margie’s attempt to distinguish herself had unwittingly undermine her own argument She argued that one reason why Chinese businessmen were operating these maternity hotels at such a large scale – “renting out blocks of apartments or motels sometimes” – was because people from Mainland China demand this services now that they have become affluent, even though earlier she suggested that Chinese(/Asian) economic dominance made U.S citizenship dispensable Specifically, Margie hypothesized that Taiwanese people, having been the more affluent society for most of the 20th century and already immigrated to the U.S in large scale, no longer see U.S citizenship as so desirable In fact, “Taiwanese passport is so easy and convenient to use!,” and affluent Taiwanese parents can afford to send their kids to the U.S., with or without U.S citizenship In contrast, Mainland China had only just become open and affluent, so getting U.S citizenship is in vogue In Margie’s narrative, which is deeply conditioned by a feeling of Taiwanese cultural superiority over Mainland China, the economic rise of Mainland China both drives up the demand for U.S citizenship and lessens its value Looking toward media representations of birth tourism from the other side, the recent hit Chinese movie Finding Mr Right9 also captures U.S citizenship’s ambivalence and contradiction The Chinese title translates literally as “Beijing Meets Seattle.” 27 vis-à-vis reproduction, while simultaneously challenges the American Dream ideology The movie’s protagonist, Jiajia, is a hsiao san (mistress of a wealthy businessman) who had to come to the U.S to give birth, but not because she wants U.S citizenship for her child or eventually herself Instead, due to China’s one-child policy and her status as a hsiao san, she would not be able to register her child in hukuo (the Chinese household registration system10) if she had given birth in China Without hukuo registration, her child cannot access healthcare, go to school, get a passport, buy a house, etc Jiajia’s circumstance is contrasted with her romantic interest Frank, a former surgeon in China who is now a chauffeur for maternity hotel owners in Seattle Frank and his wife had moved to the U.S because their precocious daughter did not fit in within the rigid Chinese education system Because his medical license is not recognized in the U.S and that her wife makes more money as an executive for a multi-national pharmaceutical company, Frank became a chauffeur and the primary caretaker for their daughter In one particular scene, Jiajia yelled to Frank at a Seattle nightclub, “It doesn’t matter how much money you have, who would want to travel thousands of miles all alone just to have a baby without any family around?” During my conversation with Margie, she cited Finding Mr Right’s popularity in China (Ma, 2013) and the cultural debates it sparked as evidence of the new Chinese wealth and desire for U.S citizenship Although the movie’s plot does not quite support Margie’s assertion, it is clear that U.S citizen-child produced through Chinese birth tourism – and the political values it represents vis-à-vis the American Dream narrative – resonates transnationally Discussion and conclusion To reiterate my main argument, it appears that for all parties involved in the Chino Hills controversy, the fetal child’s U.S citizen-ness is a crucial component in constructing political 10 For a brief overview of the hukou system, see Chan (2009) 28 arguments This is especially apparent when they draw on – and re-work – the familiar narrative of the American Dream vis-à-vis the citizen-child that is yet to come Although this paper is only a preliminary examination of Chinese birth tourism and its role in U.S immigration politics, it attempts to answer Mancini and Finlay’s (2008, page 594) call for greater scholarly attention to not just citizenship, but jus soli specifically Jus soli is a form of citizenship that is intimately tied to the territory, and there is an irony in the fact the most territorially bounded understanding of national citizenship is now a major source of anxiety for states transnationally The emergence of Chinese birth tourism as an industry demonstrates how jus soli birthright citizenship, childbearing, and neoliberalism come together in a struggle for a better future in “America’s Pacific Century” (Clinton, 2011) At the same time, charting the course for the future requires taking stock of the past, or, as David Eng (2010, 22) reminded us, the relegation of certain things into the past (and not others) is a power-laden move; it absolves us of any complicity in the present Thus, I want to place here some signposts for future research that would help mark the Chinese birth tourism in a broader historical frame and simultaneously a more specific geographical situation First, is reproductive futurism simply a new version of an old trick? I think the answer is ‘Yes’ in certain regards Reproductive futurism is fundamentally a project of subject formation, so that the child – or in biopolitical times, the fetus – is now a political subject through which to discipline and control the parents (e.g., de Leeuw, 2014; Luibhéid, 2013, ch 3; 2002, ch 3) The concern that Chino Hills residents and politicians expressed toward the well-being of Chinese women and their children, then, follows the same historical lineage as forced child removals from Native Americans and black families in the U.S under the guise of child and family welfare (Briggs, 2012, part 1) Thus, like the racial history of U.S (birthright) citizenship I presented in this 29 paper, geographers should work toward mapping out how child and family welfare function as a vehicle for state-sanction exclusions (e.g., Martin, 2011; 2012) Second, this paper demonstrates the need for a much more thorough and fine-grained ethnography of all the transnational circuits involved in birth tourism and other objects in immigration debates In addition to the circuit of migrants themselves, there are numerous other circuits – of capital, of racial formations, of geopolitics, etc – and each has its distinct geography and network Tracing all of these circuits not only can help us more thoroughly map these networks and the intermediaries within them, but also allows us to access the power structures that sustain these networks For example, asylum lawyers, family friends, ICE officials, and both formal and information brokers are a couple different types of intermediaries in these transnational circuits, but they occupy different power positions and have different relations to this object we call citizenship Much of my ongoing work is attempting to trace these circuits in relation to Chinese birth tourism, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ (2004) ethnographies have provided important methodological framework for this ongoing project At time of writing (March 2015), another round of Chinese birth tourism scandal has hit southern California again, with ICE personnel storming maternity hotels suspected of perpetuating visa fraud (Kim and Shyong, 2015) Besides coverage in the national media in both the U.S and China, this story has been picked up globally in places as far-flung as Colombia (Ximenez de Sandoval, 2015) There needs to be more research on this topic, as most reporting still rely on speculations and conjectures Last but certainly not least, (Chinese) birth tourism appears to be most prominent in traditional immigration gateway cities like the Los Angeles and New York City metropolitan areas Although gateway cities would seem to be ideal for the development of a shadow industry, 30 given the density of ethnic networks and capital (Cheng, 2013), this spatial trend – if accurate – goes against the dominant pattern of immigrant settlement in the U.S., which has been moving away from traditional gateway cities to new immigrant destinations since the 1990s 11 If the story of contemporary immigration in the U.S is “new faces in new places” (Massey, 2008), then Asian migrations today not follow the script exactly (at least not in specific regions; see Skop and Li, 2005) Additional demographic and ethnographic research – which is beyond the scope of this paper – is necessary and absolutely essential to understand (1) What is the pattern of (Chinese) birth tourism; and (2) How does this pattern influence the construction of regional and national racial formations Despite the need to develop more understanding of the birth tourism phenomenon, I have shown in this paper (however preliminarily) that birth tourism panic is a historically and geographically situated product that depends on the racialized reproductive futurism and the antijus soli history in the U.S Examining the popular rhetoric against these ambiguously American subjects, and the U.S state’s fixation on them as an indication of ‘illegal’ immigration, may help us understand new forms of transnational and American subjectivities For geographers interested in immigration and need convincing that social reproduction is important, social reproduction – quite literally – is at the center of Chinese birth tourism, and reproductive futurism offers another analytic for examining the construction of political arguments in immigration debates 11 For a brief overview of the literature on new immigrant destinations, see Ellis et al (2014) 31 References Aber S, Small M, 2013, “Citizen or subordinate: permutations of belonging in the United States and the Dominican Republic” Journal on Migration and Human Security 1(3) 76–96 Alenikoff T A, Klusmeyer D B, Eds, 2002 Citizenhip Policies for an Age of Migration (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC) Amin A, 2010, “The remainders of race” Theory, Culture & Society 27(1) 1–23 Amin A, 2013, “Surviving the turbulent future” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(1) 140–156 Anil M, 2005, “No more foreigners? 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Birthright Citizenship, Reproductive Futurism, and the Panic over Chinese Birth Tourism in Southern California Abstract: In September, 2012, residents of Chino Hills, California. .. Through the local debates over birth tourism, the intertwining of race, citizenship, and childbearing becomes visible in Southern California With the national media portraying it as a flashpoint in. .. particularly salient in the Chino Hills controversy, as the main group (the Chinese) and the main institution (jus soli birthright citizenship) under attack have an intertwined and, at times, contradictory