After driving 30 minutes east of downtown LA, I reached the apartment complex in Rowland Heights, California, that was rumored to contain a so-called Chinese “maternity hotel”: a place of questionable legality, where wealthy women seeking American citizenship for their children and a way around the one-child rule come to stay for a long vacation—one that happens to result in a baby about two-thirds of the way through.
With a Mandarin-speaking friend translating, I checked in at the leasing office and said I was looking for a maternity hotel service I’d read about on the internet. The receptionist, speaking Mandarin, answered in the affirmative. She directed us to a unit near the pool.
From the outside, the apartment resembled every single other unit in the complex: tan stucco, a brown door, and a balcony with clothes drying outside on a rack. A plucky young Chinese woman opened the door, wearing a knee-length, black and white polka dot dress. She introduced herself as Grace and brought us into a converted office area, with plenty of seating, a few travel brochures, and several pictures of pregnant women on the walls.
We asked Grace about the types of services her maternity hotel offered, saying in Mandarin that we were helping a family friend back in China who was looking to have a child in the U.S.
“For about $15,000 you can have our basic package, a three-month stay here, with food and some Los Angeles tours,” Grace explained. “If you want to pay more, you can get more tours and outings to better shopping and more time around the city.”
This is the going rate for the thousands of wealthy Chinese families looking to ensure a good future for their children. They pay a deposit, then jet off to Southern California on a tourist visa and give birth to American citizens, which provides them a way around the one-child policy and a pathway for their kids to have easier access to American schools. Maternity hotels guide them and shelter them throughout this long process.
The practice is known as birth tourism, and it’s not illegal—strictly speaking. It is, however, against the law to mislead customs officials into believing you’re in the United States purely as a tourist if your actual intention is to have a child on U.S. soil. To get around this, many maternity hotels offer a coaching service to help their clients get through customs with ease. (They also provide medical recommendations and transportation when the time comes to give birth.)
About a month ago, dozens of federal agents descended upon several apartment complexes throughout southern California, looking for evidence of maternity hotel operations where they suspected immigration and tax fraud. The hotels, of course, aren’t hotels proper: they’re set up in apartment complexes, condos, with proprietors renting units for their own use. No one was arrested in this raid, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Virginia Kice did say that the search yielded a “significant” amount of physical evidence to their investigation, along with several material witnesses.
But no sign of the raid, or any resultant fearfulness, was apparent on the day my friend and I visited the Pheasant Ridge Apartment Community in Rowland Heights, one of the complexes that had been searched. Among the drab brown buildings in the complex, the women walked around, extraordinarily pregnant and rarely alone. They were mostly kept company by their husbands and mothers, who often elected to come to the U.S. to support their wives and daughters through the pregnancy.
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