Chinese Billionaires Are Buying American Citizenship One Surrogate at a Time

There’s a surrogacy agency in Irvine, California run by an Army veteran that’s helping wealthy Chinese nationals manufacture American citizens. Let that sink in for a moment.

Haotian Bai, 37, founded Patriot Conceptions with what I assume was a straight face. The name alone deserves an award for audacity. His business model is simple enough: connect deep-pocketed Chinese clients with American surrogates and egg donors, facilitate the pregnancy, and congratulations, the resulting baby gets automatic U.S. citizenship. No immigration paperwork required. No waiting in line behind people who’ve spent decades trying to come here legally.

A surrogate named Judy recently learned she was carrying a child for Xu Bo, a Chinese billionaire who’s apparently treating American surrogacy like a factory production line. She responded to an Instagram ad promising $120,000. Not a bad payday, sure. But here’s what nobody told her upfront: Xu has reportedly fathered more than 100 children through U.S. surrogates. His former partner claims the number might be closer to 300, though his company settled on “a little over 100” after journalists started asking uncomfortable questions.

Judy was told the intended parent was a single father wanting to expand his family. When she asked how many surrogates he’d hired, they said close to two dozen. Turns out that was a significant undercount. She never met him. Never had a real conversation about what she was participating in. “I feel blindsided. I feel misled,” she told CBS News, and honestly, who wouldn’t?

This isn’t some isolated incident involving one rogue operator. The international surrogacy market in America has exploded, and it’s largely unregulated, which is exactly the kind of gap that gets exploited. An Emory University study from 2024 found that international intended parents accounted for nearly 40 percent of U.S. gestational carrier cycles by 2019. Chinese nationals made up the largest chunk of that international clientele at 41.7 percent between 2014 and 2020.

California dominates this market. Nearly 65 percent of these international surrogacy arrangements happened at California clinics during that same period. The state’s become ground zero for what amounts to citizenship arbitrage. You know what drives this demand? Surrogacy is illegal in China. So wealthy Chinese citizens who want children but either can’t or won’t have them traditionally just hop on a plane and hire American women to do it for them. The babies get U.S. passports, and suddenly their families have a foothold in America.

The Wall Street Journal reported in December that an entire ecosystem has developed around serving these Chinese clients. Fertility clinics, surrogacy agencies, attorneys, consultants. It’s an industry now, complete with specialized services and hefty price tags. Some of these clients aren’t just having one or two kids either. Xu told a Los Angeles judge in 2023 that he hoped to have roughly 20 U.S.-born children through surrogacy. The judge rejected his petition for parental rights at the time, which apparently didn’t slow him down much.

Think about the implications here. We’re talking about a system where foreign nationals can effectively purchase American citizenship for their offspring through third-party reproduction. No cultural assimilation required. No commitment to American values or civic participation. Just money changing hands and nine months later, another U.S. passport issued to a child who’ll likely be raised entirely in China.

The free market is a beautiful thing, but this crosses lines that ought to matter to anyone who cares about national sovereignty and the meaning of citizenship. American surrogates aren’t doing anything wrong by accepting these arrangements. They’re operating within the law and making personal choices about their bodies. But the law itself is the problem. It’s created an opening that turns American citizenship into a commodity for foreign elites.

Limited government doesn’t mean no government. It means government focused on its core functions, and one of those functions is controlling who becomes a citizen and under what circumstances. This surrogacy loophole makes a mockery of our immigration system. People wait years, sometimes decades, to become Americans legally. They study our history, learn our language, prove their commitment to this country. Meanwhile, a billionaire in Shanghai can hire a dozen American women and manufacture a small army of U.S. citizens without ever setting foot here beyond picking up the babies.

Bai said in a statement that the surrogate’s concerns deserve to be taken seriously, which is the kind of carefully worded nothing-response you’d expect from someone whose business model just got uncomfortable national attention. Patriot Conceptions disputed parts of CBS’s reporting but didn’t exactly deny the fundamental reality of what they’re facilitating.

This isn’t about xenophobia or singling out China specifically. If wealthy Europeans or Australians were doing this at the same scale, it would be equally problematic. But they’re not. The numbers show Chinese nationals dominating this market, and that’s not accidental. It’s strategic. China’s government restricts surrogacy domestically while its wealthiest citizens exploit America’s permissive system to create dual-national children. Those kids grow up with Chinese values and Chinese education but hold American passports that grant them access, opportunities, and legal protections that come with U.S. citizenship.

Congress needs to close this loophole yesterday. Birthright citizenship made sense when it was enacted after the Civil War to ensure freed slaves couldn’t be denied citizenship. It makes considerably less sense when applied to children born through commercial surrogacy arrangements specifically designed to game the system. The law should require that at least one parent be an American citizen or legal permanent resident for a child born through surrogacy to receive automatic citizenship.

Until then, expect more agencies like Patriot Conceptions to keep cashing in while America’s citizenship becomes just another luxury good for the global elite.

Related: When Surrogacy Contracts Collide With Conscience and Nobody Wins