Joe Guzzardi: Start Tourism Thrives in New York Metropolis because the Large Apple Loses Legit Companies | Opinions

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(Nate Beeler cartoon / caglecartoons.com)

Businesses headquartered in New York City have, in large numbers, relocated elsewhere, or plan to leave, mainly to Florida or other welcoming locations in the Southeast.

Some businesses like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan & Co. have Wall Street roots that date back to the mid-19th century.

Thousands of high-paying financial institution jobs packed up and left as employers such as Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, UBS, Citigroup and AllianceBernstein moved staffers to less expensive destinations in North Carolina, Dallas, Nashville and Salt Lake City.

Residents, too, can’t flee Manhattan fast enough. About 3.57 million people, including many high-income earners, left Manhattan between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, 2020. Although millions, mostly lower income, arrived to replace them, the net exodus cost the city $34 billion in revenue.

Individuals and businesses both cited the same reasons for getting out of Dodge while the getting was still good: high taxes, soaring living costs, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inept governance, calls to defund the police amid ever-increasing, random crime, and questionable school shutdowns.

A Manhattan Commission survey found that 44 percent of city dwellers who earn more than $100,000, and contribute 80 percent of the city’s income tax revenue, have considered moving. Comptroller Scott Stringer warned that the city’s wealthiest residents who remain should be prepared to pay higher taxes to close the huge $4.2 billion deficit.

While legitimate businesses, and the executives who manage them, are bolting from the Big Apple, another albeit less savory industry with dubious oversight is thriving. In New York, birth tourism, the blatant federal immigration law abuser, is resurgent.

But, a cautionary note to Stringer who may be expecting a tax windfall: birth tourism is often unregulated and unlicensed. Similar maternity hotel operators have been indicted for tax evasion. Stringer’s city may never see a dime.

In 2015 in Santa Ana, federal agents executed 35 search warrants stemming from the work of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles, IRS Criminal Investigations, the Irvine Police Department and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. The result: federal criminal charges for widespread immigration fraud, international money laundering, and defrauding property owners who leased their apartments and houses to shelter the aliens.

The Los Angeles Times reported that, at the time, several hundred Chinese birthing sites were listed at Southern California locations.

The template years ago in California is unchanged today in New York. Operators set up a website in the foreign national’s native language — most frequently Chinese but also Korean, Russian and Spanish — to encourage pregnant women to pay between $40,000 and $80,000.

In exchange for the princely sums, the women will receive coaching on how to deceive airport immigration officials, how to obtain ethnically specific care once in the United States, and how to birth an American citizen child.

Too often, U.S. taxpayers pick up a big chunk of the tab. One Chinese couple paid the indigent hospital rate — $4,080 — even though they had more than $225,000 in a bank account that they opened to pay for luxury shopping sprees.

It’s unknown how many skip out on payment altogether in the United States. Leaving unpaid medical bills for birthing babies has been reported in the Northern Marianas, significant because, as a U.S. territory, children born there are eligible for U.S. citizenship.

A reported birth tourism case in Canada left a hospital with an unpaid $1.2 million neonatal bill.

Little in the birthing industry has changed since the practice became common 30 years ago. A May 15 New York Post story revealed that in the greater metropolitan area 80 birthing centers operate brazenly.

Yet Congress inexplicably continues to tolerate what amounts to several federal felonies being carried out, punishment-free, under their noses: visa application fraud, money laundering, Medicare fraud, income tax fraud and identity theft.

Birth tourism is terrible for America, and poses a national security threat. Anchor babies, granted U.S. citizenship under the 14th Amendment’s misinterpretation, mean that thousands of individuals will, through a fraudulent process, receive free K-12 public education and myriad other affirmative benefits.

Eventually, they will serve as anchors for their returned parents, and non-nuclear, extended family members who will receive the same entitlements.

With political courage, three solutions could in short order end birth tourism.

First, prosecute offenders to the law’s full extent, including mothers. After obtaining a medical certificate that the mother can safely travel, fly her home. Otherwise, she can give birth while detained, under a medical doctor’s care, and then be sent home. She’ll achieve her original goal, a citizen child, but under dramatically different circumstances than she originally envisioned.

Second, Congress must toughen up. Remove the citizenship enticement; pass legislation that citizenship requires at least one parent be a citizen or a lawfully present resident. Not surprisingly, previous efforts at common-sense birth citizenship reform had few congressional co-sponsors.

Third, utilize the “fruit from the poisonous tree” doctrine that, in birth citizenship cases, would mean the citizenship benefits were ill-gotten, and therefore must be forfeited to the government, e.g., citizenship revoked. Congress must not keep rolling over on the 3-decade-old birth tourism scam that hurts Americans and helps foreign nationals, mostly Chinese.

These bold but lawful actions would minimize and eventually end birth tourism travel. The proposed remedies are simple, direct and legal.

Nevertheless, an inert Congress steadfastly refuses to implement any of the three, and is content to tacitly endorse the jus soli process — Latin meaning “the right of soil” — that other most developed nations abolished long ago.

The United States should join other advanced nations, and grant treasured citizenship based on the child’s parents’ nationality or resident status.

— Joe Guzzardi is an analyst and researcher with Progressives for Immigration Reform who now lives in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at (email protected), or follow him on Twitter: @joeguzzardi19. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.