It’s no secret that President Trump loves Florida (home of the Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach) or that he has many Russian connections there. He owns a few properties in the Sunny Isles Beach area and was instrumental in attracting wealthy Russians to the area now known as Little Moscow. His name is still synonymous with luxury and power. If you go through a birth tourism company to book a babymoon package in a Trump apartment, you’re looking at a cost of at least $75,000. A top-tier package through SVM-MED will get you a home-away-from-home at the Trump Tower II with a gold bathtub and a private Cadillac or Mercedes car service, all for just $84,700.
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And the enthusiasm has taken a not-altogether unexpected turn with … Russian parents who want dual citizenship for their babies. The Daily Beast has a new feature that digs into the growing trend.
For example, glance at the Instagram hashtag #майамимам, or #MiamiMama, and you’ll see blithely happy Russian women pushing strollers past palm trees and enjoying life in Miami’s luxurious Russian emigre community with their children. Click on the #родывмайами hashtag, which translates to #BirthInMiami, and you’ll see 21,000 snapshots of a growing group of women who travel to Florida not settle down permanently, but to bask in luxury foreign vacations that come with one incredible door prize — U.S. citizenship for their babies. And where do they prefer to post up for the last stages of their pregnancy and the postpartum period before baby can travel? Donald Trump’s Miami properties are often at the top of the list.
While the Trump Organization doesn’t directly profit off the companies that sublease apartments in Trump apartment towers for expectant Russian mothers, it’s integral to the fabric of the whole culture and landscape of the Miami birth tourism scene. Best of all, that five figure expenditure doesn’t only include fine furnishings and a chauffeur. It gets your baby U.S. citizenship by birthright. When that baby turns 21, he or she can file for family reunification and apply for Green Cards for parents and non-citizen siblings.
If those last details sound familiar, it’s because they describe a glammed-up version of the anchor baby scenario bandied about during the presidential campaign last fall. The fear was that undocumented parents who came here to have children were finding a way around proper immigration procedure. The difference between the perception of the children of Russians and Mexican illegal aliens wasn’t hard to parse for one Russian birth tourist, however. Tanya Yanygina explained to the Daily Beast, “When Trump was elected, he said he wanted to eliminate citizenship based on place of birth. But he said that in reference to people from the Middle East and Mexico.”
In light of the Trump administration’s rescinding of DACA this week, all of this looks, well, as interesting as always.
(Via The Daily Beast)