A Chinese billionaire tried. Give him that. But do we have to like what he was up to?
The trier in question is fantasy video-game mogul Xu Bo, and The Wall Street Journal reports that he is trying to gain a foothold in the United States in a somewhat novel way … for a rich man, anyway.
He’s fathering children in America. Many children.
And by non-wives who are under surrogacy contracts to bear his children for him.
While domestic surrogacy is illegal in China, it’s not in the U.S. So, being a resourceful billionaire, and inspired by Elon Musk’s fathering of 14 known children, he took action.
A family court in California noticed. When it realized the man was petitioning for parental rights “to at least four unborn children,” explains the Journal, and “learned he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more through surrogates, it raised alarm,” and his request was denied.
A “rare rebuke to a little-known trend in the largely unregulated U.S. surrogacy industry” — and it’s a trend that the Chinese super-wealthy are taking advantage of.
What advantage? Birthright citizenship: “Babies born via surrogacy in the U.S. are U.S. citizens by virtue of the 14th Amendment.”
This issue, which looms rather large as tens of millions flocked to America during the Biden years, is key. It allows for all sorts of abuse.
Because the world has changed in 157 years.
Now that the “millionaires and billionaires” are horning in on the act, will Democrats re-think their commitment to birthright citizenship?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Billionaire Baby Ploy”
The “commitment to birthright citizenship” is codified in the 14th Amendment.
Anyone who doesn’t favor getting 2/3 of both houses of Congress and 3/4 of the state legislatures to amend the Constitution and discard that particular provision (and the entirety of American history prior to its ratification) is “committed to birthright citizenship.”
That includes presidents who pretend that they can amend the Constitution by executive order. If Trump was serious about ending birthright citizenship, he’d push for that constitutional amendment instead of purveying fantasies.
Mr Knapp, I quite agree with most of what you have said above, but I think that Trump may hope for a majority of the Supreme Court to deliver a lawyerly misrepresentation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Similar things have happened previously.
There are a few words in the 14th Amendment that can be pesky: ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’. Is this billionaire in the US currently? Do his surrogacy contracts require the birth mother to surrender any claim to the child? Is the birth mother an American citizen? The child may be an American citizen by birth, but can the woman be forced to surrender the child to a foreigner who is not subject to the jurisdiction of the US? It would suggest that he should not have parental rights while (if) he remains a Chinese citizen and wants to take them to China. Instead he should be required to adopt the children and make them CHINESE citizens, since they would not reside in the US. The whole thing is confusing.