“A San Bernardino County man was sentenced today to 41 months in federal prison for operating a ‘birth tourism’ scheme that charged Chinese clients tens of thousands of dollars to help them give birth in the United States to obtain birthright US citizenship for their children. Michael Wei Yueh Liu (刘维岳), 59, of Rancho Cucamonga, was sentenced by United States District Judge Gary Klausner.”
“At the conclusion of a four-day trial, a jury on September 13 found Liu and Jing Dong, (董晶), 47, of Rancho Cucamonga, guilty of one count of conspiracy and 10 counts of international money laundering. Dong is expected to be sentenced in the coming weeks. From at least January 2012 to March 2015, Liu and Dong ran a maternity house in Rancho Cucamonga. Liu and Dong rented apartments in Southern California to provide short-term housing and provided other services to pregnant women from China who traveled to the United States to give birth so their children would acquire US citizenship. Typically, within one or two months after giving birth, the women returned to China. Among the services Liu and Dong provided were assistance on how to obtain visas to enter the United States, customs entry guidance, housing, and transportation in the United States, as well as assistance applying for US legal documents for the children of their customers. Liu and Dong advised their customers on how to hide their pregnancies from the immigration authorities.”
“Liu and Dong also knew – or deliberately avoided learning – that their customers lied on their visa applications submitted to immigration authorities to enter the US. Generally, their customers’ visa applications falsely stated that the purpose of the trip to the United States was for tourism, when it was to give birth, and the length of the stay was days or weeks, when it was in fact months. The visas also misstated the location where the customers intended to stay, which was defendants’ maternity hotel,” says a Justice Department press release on the birthwrong citizenship ring.
Get it? Birthwrong? Haha!
Anyway this isn’t like Liu and Dong were smuggling fentanyl or sex slaves or some other extremely clear cut violation of the law/moral crime against polite society. It was walking these moms-to-be through the steps they would’ve taken themselves if they felt confident in their own ability to work the system. Obviously it required some form of money laundering for Liu to do whatever he did to hide the income and thus a not particularly creative prosecutor was able to build the case against him. The Justice Department press team wrote in the “charged Chinese clients tens of thousands of dollars” part as if they wouldn’t have found another way to prosecute him if this was some sort of oddball philanthropic endeavor. Then it probably would’ve been “inducing false statements to customs personnel” or whatever perjury-adjacent statute because of the scripted lies.
None of this is to say he’s a good guy getting fucked by the system, it’s just hard not to feel something akin to moral relativism here, that this has to be a crime when certain other, less grey area instances of international corruption visit themselves upon the United States. We’re never going to get to the bottom of the Egyptian bribery scam from convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s first inauguration in 2016, to cite just one, recently revealed, example of a large, vile morass of foreign fuckery swirling around the orange twat over the last decade. That’s to say nothing of the Russians, the Saudis, you name the scumbags tied to the deeply corrupt past and future president.
Is that whataboutery? Sure, though it just feels off that this sort of crime-ish behavior, which will no doubt be printed as spank material on Fox News, Breitbart, and other MAGA websites shortly if it hasn’t already, is to them a crystal clear violation of American sovereignty while all the foreign money being funneled through Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties somehow isn’t because Trump’s a legitimate businessman and all those other stupid bullshit lines the fanboys like to spew.
Maybe it’s as simple as saying Liu picked the wrong racket.