Chinese Seeking Surrogate Mothers In America

Wealthy Chinese have increasingly been looking for surrogate mothers overseas in America.  The numbers are very small right now, however, there are expectations that this business could grow quite a bit in a few short years. The reason? Firstly it is to help get around the 1 child per family law that is still being enforced, though less stringently than in the past, and the second, perhaps more important reason, is a way into America.  There is already a business around transporting pregnant Chinese women to the states so that they can deliver in an America hospital due to the better quality of care and the bonus of automatic citizenship for their children. Having a baby born in the United States also makes it easier, at least theoretically, for them to obtain permanent residency Visas.

Currently a wealthy foreigner needs to invest over five hundred thousand dollars to obtain an EB-5 Visa.  Given that the cost of surrogacy is somewhere around two hundred to three hundred thousand there is a definite financial incentive in doing so.  I won't go so far as to say the the wealthy Chinese are only having children via American surrogates so that they can obtain permanent entry into America, however, if you are wealthy and want a second child, it is more cost effective than investing into the a business in America.

This also begs the question, why are they doing this?  The Captain recently raised the question, factories or office buildings? First, I have to say that the United States is still the the second largest manufacturing nation in the world and in terms of industrial base as a per capita the United States is still much larger and if need be it is much easier to move a factory down the value chain than up so it isn't like we produce nothing.

More importantly, I don't think it necessarily matters that China produces more stuff.  It's not that production isn't important because it is very important. It's that excessive production isn't any better than excess consumption, in fact I would daresay it's worse. All the stuff we have bought, from T-shirts to aircraft carriers, will still be around once the good times come to an end. Factories are pretty much worthless if you don't have a market for what they produce, as one commenter pointed out.

Now, I don't want you to think that I am a Pollyanna who is mindlessly touting that the United States shall always prevail because I am saying that China will not surpass the United States. I fundamentally agree with the Captain's premise that America is in a serious decline. It's just that America isn't the only nation facing the decline and that the problems facing China are much more serious than America's.  America decline because of the stupidity of our ruling aristocrats and the numerous self inflicted wounds their ill-conceived policies have inflicted over the course of the last century. Even with all the progressive policies that are hurting us we still posses tremendous inherent advantages that form the building blocks of a wealthy and powerful nation. On the other hand there is China, which not only suffers from the ill-conceived policies of their elite, but also have inherent inhibitors that stymie their nation continuously.  To summarize, America has a lot of farmland, a lot of resources, a lot of space, a lot of water, and geography that is conducive towards facilitating low cost trade. Every advantage America has in that I listed, China has as a detriment along with a political system even more dysfunctional than ours.

In closing, it is one thing to send your children to a foreign country to be educated because you think they will be better off for it. The wealthy in America did the same thing over a century ago; however, unlike the wealthy today, they didn't seek to have their children born abroad so they could have an 'emergency exit'. If this were simply about circumventing the one child policy then the wealthy would be going to nearby South East Asia, but they aren't, they are going to America and they are doing this for a reason.