Stephen Miller Floats Bans for Pregnant Travelers

In the wake of Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller rolled out MAGA’s newest talking point on the issue of children born to undocumented immigrants. Speaking with Fox News host Jesse Watters, Miller maligned the high court’s decision while suggesting that the United States will have to reform immigration policies to combat what he pejoratively called “birth tourism.” “But if you have birthright citizenship, it means if a person comes here nine months pregnant to go

look around at some things, in a couple of weeks, that is the mother of a lifetime American citizen and a direct line into American cash and welfare for the rest of that child’s life,” Miller said. Watters asked if Miller was considering banning foreign pregnant women from entering the U.S., even temporarily. “Well, what I’m saying, Jesse, is that you have to now think very carefully about who you let into your country, even on a temporary basis, because the possibility, as you said,

for birth tourism, right, they do that. People come here just to have babies on American soil, and that baby gets to be a citizen for life,” Miller said. Miller added that he believes that babies born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants would be able to send welfare checks back home to “support a whole family in the third world.” “So, yes, you can’t have the kinds of immigration programs other countries have when you can just have a baby here, and now that

child is an American citizen. So, there’s a lot of things we’re gonna have to take a hard look at, Jesse,” Miller said. Miller isn’t the only MAGA figure floating the idea of banning foreign-born pregnant women from entering the U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) on Tuesday introduced a bill he called the “Anchors Away Act” aimed at limiting or outright banning certain foreign-born pregnant women from entering the U.S. “Under my bill, under my legislation, we fix that and go back to what our

founders intended. So in short, what this bill does is if you are a pregnant woman, you can’t come into this country. You got to be a citizen, be here, you have to be a green card holder. So if you’re pregnant and you don’t have one of those statuses, no admittance allowed,” Ogles said in a video posted to social media on Tuesday. President Donald Trump also called on Congress to pass legislation to end birthright citizenship. In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies,

an organization that advocates low immigration, estimated the possible number of birth tourism cases at 20,000 to 26,000 per year, less than 1% of the 3.61 million births in the U.S. that year.

Stephen Miller, birthright citizenship, Supreme Court, Jesse Watters, birth tourism, immigration policy, Andy Ogles, Anchors Away Act, pregnancy travel ban, Donald Trump, Center for Immigration Studies