A singer in China’s famous Beijing Opera, Danyang Yang flew to Vancouver in 2014 to have her baby in a Canadian hospital. She did so to deliver another child in 2017, like thousands of other so-called birth tourists who come to Canada each year.

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Both times Yang immediately returned to China. A few years later, the singer and her husband, Tong Zhang, moved their family and much of their real-estate fortune to Canada, where they eventually became permanent residents.

When the couple’s extensive Metro Vancouver property holdings become the subject of a lawsuit, a B.C. Supreme Court judge recently asked why Yang chose to give birth in Canada.

“Canada is a very tolerant country,” Yang answered. “We thought it would be a wise idea to give birth to our second child and third child here.”

Birthright citizenship, which makes possible so-called “anchor babies” who automatically gain the full privileges of citizenship in the countries in which they’re born, is a simmering political issue in Canada. In the U.S., it’s even more fiery, for different reasons.

The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to make a decision this summer on President Donald Trump’s executive order to stop birthright citizenship, which isn’t common in most of the world. The practice of jus soli (right of soil) exists in the U.S., Canada and 30 other countries.

Birthright citizenship grants automatic passports to babies born on Canadian or U.S. soil to non-citizens, which includes people on valid student or guest-worker visas and undocumented migrants.

Pew Research reported this month that nearly 10 per cent of all births in the U.S. in 2023 fall in the category of birthright citizenship.

Of the 320,000 babies in the U.S. who gained birthright citizenship in 2023, Pew said 245,000 were born to unauthorized migrants, 15,000 were born to mothers who had temporary legal status and about 60,000 were born to mothers who were unauthorized migrants while the child’s father was a citizen or permanent resident.

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Pew Research demographer Jeffrey Passel noted “birth tourists,” or mothers who obtain temporary visas specifically to secure U.S. citizenship for their newborns, accounted for about 9,000 of U.S. births in 2023.

While the American public remains divided on the outcome of the upcoming Supreme Court ruling, some U.S. authorities have nevertheless been cracking down on those who run so-called birth hotels. This year a California couple who operated a birth hotel were sentenced to three years in prison for money laundering and helping Chinese women travel to the U.S. under false pretences so they could deliver their babies there.

While birth hotels operate in Canada, where it’s an offence to counsel people to mislead border officials, no charges have ever been laid in this country.

Birthright citizenship is controversial for several reasons. Some critics have described it as a form of queue-jumping to citizenship, which confers privileges such as access to free or subsidized education, universal health care and other government benefits, including the right to eventually sponsor one’s parents.

Last fall federal Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner proposed a change to Canada’s birth citizenship law, which, unlike in the U.S., isn’t embedded in the Constitution. She put forward a motion to stop citizenship being granted to children born in Canada to non-citizens unless at least one parent is a permanent resident. It was defeated.

Former Canadian immigration minister Jason Kenney, who also served as premier of Alberta, spoke about the issue last month in a social media post, saying he tried 12 years ago to end automatic citizenship through birth on Canadian soil.

“It was clear to me that birth tourism was a growing problem, cheapening the value of Canadian citizenship. Birth tourism businesses were openly operating in places like Richmond, B.C., selling package deals to fly expectant mothers in from foreign countries, housing them, and arranging for their childbirth in Canadian hospitals,” Kenney said.

“But provincial governments, who have responsibility for maintaining vital statistics such as the registration of births, refused to co-operate with us on the issue.”

While Kenney’s previous efforts focused on ending birth tourism, he also expressed concern about other forms of birthright citizenship.

Andrew Griffith, a retired director in the immigration department, found in 2024 that the number of tourism births across all provinces was 5,219 or about 1.5 per cent. Of those births, 2,755 occurred in Ontario, 1,370 in Quebec, 513 in B.C. and 331 in Alberta. The rest of the total births are in the others provinces.

As for how many babies were born in Canada to foreign students, asylum seekers or guest workers, Griffith says no one knows due to inadequate data.

While Pew Research reports almost one-in-10 babies born in the U.S. in 2023 became birthright citizens, Griffith said that he believes Canada’s proportion would be lower than the U.S., largely because Canada has fewer unauthorized migrants.

Whatever the precise numbers, Griffith is among those who say it’s much harder for Americans to change the U.S. Constitution, where the 14th amendment of 1868 grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” than it is to alter Canada’s 1985 Citizenship Act.

Griffith says the best and simplest change would be to follow Australia’s example in regard to birthright citizenship. To reduce the chances of exploitation, he recommends allowing a baby born on Canadian soil to receive automatic citizenship only if at least one of the child’s parents is already a citizen or permanent resident.

dtodd@postmedia.com