Voices

Betting on the US could backfire on greedy parents

By Earle Gale (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-07 11:02

I can't really understand why so many Chinese people clamor to get their hands on foreign passports with the enthusiasm of teenagers trying to snag Lady Gaga concert tickets.

The question kept rattling around my head while I read a story in China Daily on July 4 about the many couples who fly to the United States gripping tourist visas, just so they can have their babies there.

The expectant couples lie to customs officers, pretending to be simple tourists and presumably hiding the give-away bump, then surprise everyone by producing a baby in a US hospital.

A few weeks later, the couples scoop up their newborns and scuttle back to China with not just one bundle of joy but two - both a new baby and citizenship from the "home of the brave" for their new arrival.

The whole thing is made possible by the fact that the US generously grants citizenship to anyone born on its soil, regardless of the status of that child's parents at the time.

A spokesman from one Beijing agency said in the story that he had helped thousands of people get US citizenship in the 10 years he had been on the job. He boasted that around 50 couples from the capital make the pilgrimage every month.

Extrapolating that information, the number of Chinese babies born in the US each year under similar circumstances, helped by other agencies or facilitated by the parents and their relatives alone, must run into the thousands.

I wonder if all those parents really know what they are doing.

The story made me think of a conversation I had a few months ago with friends visiting the capital.

We had been walking through the Temple of Heaven when they told me their apparently heavenly marriage was not all it appeared to be.

The couple, a Canadian man and his Chinese wife, complained about not getting to see each other nearly enough.

He, with a business in North America, was spending most of his time "over there" while she, Shanghai born and raised, was in China almost constantly, caring for her ailing mother.

They had to make do with a week or two together, here and there, each year.

I thought their parting had been a temporary arrangement that would end when the mother's health improved but, apparently, they were increasingly being pulled in two directions by their irreconcilable love of their respective countries.

"I'd rather spend all of my time here in China," she said, eyeing her nervous husband as if it was a conversation they had had more than one time too many. "But he wants to stay in Canada."

He shot back that China was a nice place to visit but not somewhere he would like to live on a long-term basis.

He said it in such a way as to make me think he was really saying, "you knew this when you married me".

Apparently they had enjoyed a long and happy marriage and raised a son in Canada but, in their autumn years, their hearts rested in different places.

"I probably wouldn't even go to Canada at all if I didn't have to," she said. "But I have to keep going back over there to renew my visa."

And it was then that I realized for the first time the difficult decision many Chinese people living overseas have to make.

She explained to me that she took out Canadian citizenship when she lived in North America to provide some stability for her son. And she told me that China will not allow its citizens to hold two passports, so she had to renounce her Chinese citizenship when she become a naturalized Canadian.

Back then, she said, it was a no-brainer because 20 years ago, Canada offered much better prospects than China.

Wind the clock forward 20 years and she is ruing her decision.

"I'm Chinese, but as far as the authorities are concerned, I'm a Canadian living in China and I have to keep leaving and renewing my visa," she complained. "I think it was a big mistake to give it up in the first place."

I wonder how many of these children of Chinese parents being born in the US will thank their mother and father for their citizenship in the years to come, when they have to keep leaving China to renew their papers because they are considered foreigners in their own country - all for the sake of gaining access to an education system that may well lag behind China's 20 years from now.

In the meantime, those kids living in China with Chinese parents but US passports will not only have to keep leaving the country to renew their visas but they could also encounter difficulties when applying for social security, traveling and looking for a home.

When I think of all of those parents who are basically gambling on the US being a better place to be than China in the long-term, I really have to give my head a shake.