Jus Soli and Birth Tourism: Half the Non-Resident Births Were Birth Tourism. The Pandemic Numbers Suggests So

 Birth Tourism in Canada: with pandemic restricted  travel,  the magnitude is now somewhat known:

From the National Post Comment  (emailed form, no link available) - "ONE VERY SMALL CHEER FOR COVID-19, SORT OF

It's possible that Omicron panic and the holiday season will wash over this interesting news item, so we're inserting it here while it's still warm from the oven. The author and ex-civil servant Andrew Griffith, Canada's closest observer of the contested phenomenon of “birth tourism,” has a new paper in Policy Options today. Birth tourism occurs when non-citizens come to Canada specifically for the purpose of giving birth on Canadian soil (at their own expense) and thereby gaining precious Canadian citizenship for their children. 

Birth tourism is something that is obviously happening — the Richmond Hospital in British Columbia seems to be partly organized around facilitating it — but its prevalence has been hard to measure with confidence because some people turning up in the “non-resident self-pay” column in hospital statistics might be Canadian citizens or guest workers. To pin down the amount of genuine birth tourism, it would be helpful if, say, there was a whole year in which mere visitors were largely excluded from Canada, but Canadian citizens, international students and temporary workers were still coming and going. 

If something weird like that were ever to happen, the decline in the “non-resident self-pay” births would give us a pretty good idea of how large the ordinary background rate of birth tourism was … 

In other words, thanks, SARS-CoV-2! The 2020-21 counts of hospital births from the Canadian Institute of Health Information are now available (CIHI follows fiscal years starting April 1), and Griffith has had at them. The background numbers on things like visitor visas and temporary foreign worker applications show that the pandemic made Griffith's natural experiment almost perfect. With potential birth tourists largely shut out of the country, but citizens and workers free to come and go, the number of non-resident self-funded childbirths in Canadian hospitals nosedived from a peak of 5,968 in 2019-20, to just 2,433 in 2020-21. At the Richmond Hospital, the count went from 502 to 68; dramatic declines are also seen in other hospitals that typically have heavy non-resident caseloads. 

Griffith used to say he thought that half the non-resident births were birth tourism. The pandemic numbers suggest that this was, if anything, an underestimate. But it's in the right neighbourhood. We can now say with some confidence that in normal times, roughly one per cent of all childbirths in Canada are foreign visitors exploiting our “jus soli” citizenship (i.e., if you're born here, citizenship is automatic and unconditional). The overall number of non-resident self-funded births was growing fast before COVID-19. 

Of course, birth tourists aren't spongers, since they're paying out of pocket, but the happy children born under Canada's sun represent permanent obligations for the Canadian welfare state and its consular establishment. There has been more argument than serious inquiry into the birth tourism phenomenon up until now because no one was certain of its size. That can change now, but will it? 

— Colby Cosh