The Supreme Court barely finished reaffirming birthright citizenship before the price list came out. Wealthy Chinese couples are shipping their embryos to California, implanting them in American women, and flying home with a brand-new U.S. citizen. The man running the operation is a U.S. Army veteran with a Hoover Institution fellowship on his résumé, the New York Post reports. Incredibly, every bit of it is legal.
The agency is Patriot Conceptions, based in Irvine and founded by 37-year-old Haotian Bai. Surrogates are recruited informally through social media and paid between $60,000 and $120,000 to carry a child whose parents they may never meet. The children are then “swept off by their parents to be raised in China, where it is seen as a status symbol among the wealthy to have a child able to claim US citizenship,” according to the Post. Bai’s own 2024 profile on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website put his “international” client share at 40 percent, and a review of the company’s materials suggests those clients are almost entirely Chinese. The website comes in Chinese or English and tells visitors the best way to reach the company is through WeChat.
The company even publishes a map. Twenty-five states are marked as offering a “generally supportive posture” for the child to easily obtain U.S. citizenship, with foreign parents advised to study each state’s laws before picking a surrogate. Only Louisiana is colored black for “restrictive or unresolved posture.” Let that sink in. The base price for future parents runs $120,000 to $200,000, and parents typically arrive on a tourist visa to do the embryo work, or simply ship the embryos in from overseas.
Patriot Conceptions made headlines last week when a surrogate identified as “Judy” learned from CBS News, not from the agency, that she was carrying the child of reclusive Chinese billionaire Xu Bo, who has allegedly fathered more than 300 children. Pressed by the Post, Bai offered a lawyerly non-denial: “We do not disclose client demographic breakdowns. We collect intended parents’ nationality at intake and disclose it to the surrogate during matching. A parent’s foreign nationality … does not by itself establish that obtaining citizenship is the purpose of an arrangement.”
Bai’s path to this business is its own story. Sources told the Post he arrived from Lanzhou University around 2012 for a master’s degree at Iowa State, then “joined the Army to get citizenship” under a program that fast-tracked green cards for non-citizen enlistees. He rose to lieutenant. In 2019, as a “Hawaii realtor,” he was accused of selling Hawaiian legislative internships to Chinese students for $5,000 apiece — interns who showed up unrequested in the office of a state lawmaker doing missile-defense and FBI counterintelligence work. “These Chinese kids were not necessarily what they claimed to be there for. There was something suspicious about it. I brought it to the FBI’s attention,” former Rep. Matthew LoPresti told the Post. Bai faced no charges and denies ever selling internships. Five years later, Stanford’s Hoover Institution made him a Veterans Fellow.
This is a window into what happens when a loophole meets a market. The Post has already documented Chinese birth tourism turning the Northern Mariana Islands into a citizenship factory, with an estimated 1.5 million American children now being raised in China, future voters who can one day sponsor relatives through chain migration. Patriot Conceptions cuts out the plane ticket for mom. Until Congress decides American citizenship is not a luxury good, China’s wealthiest families will keep buying it by the embryo — and California will keep hosting the delivery room.
Source: nypost.com