According to new statistics, one out of four births in Richmond Hospital involves an international mother.
The so-called “birth tourism” is a controversial occurrence in which expectant mothers from outside Canada come to Canada for the purpose of obtaining a Canadian passport for their newborn babies by skipping the standard immigration processes.
While talking about birth tourism, Andrew Griffith, a one time Director-General of Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada who at present is a fellow at the Environics Institute said: “It’s perceived as an abuse of birthright citizenship.
“Birthright citizenship was really designed for people who moved to Canada, who immigrated to Canada, gave birth to their children, so their children would automatically have Canadian citizenship.
“It was never designed for a world where you could stay in a birth hotel or a hostel, give birth and fly back to your country of origin.”
Griffith has been gathering numbers from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which compiles data from hospitals across Canada over the past few years.
A chart created by Griffith depicts a 10-year trend of births by non-residents and shows an increment in the practice.
In the data, Griffith notes that the term “non-resident” can also refer to international students and foreign workers. According to his estimates, birth tourists account for approximately 50 percent of the non-resident births.
The new figures reveal the 2019-2020 fiscal year and do not factor in the majority of the months during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The data reveal that births by non-residents consitute 24 percent of the deliveries at Richmond Hospital, a slight increment from that of the year before.
The numbers increased by over a third for Vancouver’s St. Paul’s and and Mount Saint Joseph hospitals where non-residents consitute 14 per cent of the total births.
Griffith said: “What I find interesting is that I haven’t seen really any similar outcry in any other community – even in those centres where there seems to be fairly high numbers of non-resident births – and I’m just not quite sure why that is, because it seems like the focus always is on Richmond.”
Politicians from all three tiers of government in Richmond have been asking Ottawa to do more to end the practice.
The Mayor of Richmond, Malcolm Brodie said: “We just feel that that is not fair, it really degrades the citizenship that we all enjoy.”
He disclosed that the municipal government has been requesting that birth tourism be looked into, but it seems the requests have fallen on deaf ears.
Brodie said: “We can insist that those practices that are operating a business to house the birth tourists have a business licence. There’s not all that much more that we can do, other than keep highlighting the problem.”
In his own view, Jas Johal, the BC Liberal MLA for Richmond-Queensborough, feels Ottawa can discourage the practice by raising fees for international mothers but the responsibility lies with the federal government.
Johal said: “One out of four children born at our hospital are foreign nationals – that’s not a hospital anymore, it’s a passport mill.
“If you’re coming here to have a child on a tourist visa, well, guess what? That application for citizenship is null and void. A simple change like that would probably reduce, and probably eliminate, birth tourism in Canada.”
Also, the two Conservative members of parliament for the area, Kenny Chiu and Alice Wong, raised their objection to the practice.
