Three Republican senators have called on the Trump administration to scrap a visa waiver program that lets Chinese nationals flock to American Pacific territories, where they can give birth and secure U.S. citizenship for their children.
In a letter sent January 15 to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Senators Rick Scott of Florida, Jim Banks of Indiana, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma laid out how the Guam-CNMI visa waiver has turned into a loophole for what they call a “cottage industry” of birth tourism.
The program, set up back in 2009, gives Chinese passport holders up to 14 days visa-free in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. What started as a way to boost tourism has morphed into something far more troubling, according to the senators.
They point to cases where pregnant women from China time their visits to deliver babies on U.S. soil, granting those kids automatic citizenship under the 14th Amendment. While the numbers have fallen—from a peak of 581 births in 2018 to just 58 in 2024—the practice persists, straining the islands’ limited resources like the Northern Marianas’ sole public hospital.
“This is an ongoing security vulnerability that Xi Jinping and his successors in the [Chinese Communist Party] will be more than happy to exploit,” the senators wrote in their letter.
They argue that kids born through this scheme could grow up to snag sensitive government jobs, leveraging their Mandarin skills and potential ties back to Beijing. It’s not hard to imagine the CCP grooming these American citizens as assets, slipping them into positions where they could feed intelligence or influence policy down the line. Recent smuggling busts add fuel to these fears: one involved a Chinese national hauling eight others from Saipan to Guam, with most caught near military bases. Another saw four men jailed for sneaking 21 Chinese nationals ashore to dodge border checks.
President Trump has weighed in on birth tourism before, noting during a press briefing how “China is making a big business out of that. They come to the country. They have a child. They’re an American citizen. They get all the benefits.”
His administration now faces pressure to act swiftly, especially since the outgoing Biden team expanded the program in its last days, opening it wider to mainland Chinese visitors. The senators want a switch to standard tourist visas for all Chinese nationals heading to the CNMI, a move Noem could make unilaterally.
Not everyone’s on board. Rep. Kimberlyn King-Hinds, a Republican from the Northern Marianas, pushes back, saying birth tourism isn’t the monster it’s made out to be compared to foreign births across the U.S. mainland. She warns that clamping down could gut the local tourism economy, which relies heavily on Chinese visitors. Hotel vacancies spiked 30% last year when Customs and Border Protection paused processing briefly, and the Marianas Visitors Authority calls the waiver “essential” for keeping businesses afloat.
Experts echo the senators’ national security worries. Simon Hankinson from the Heritage Foundation notes that China doesn’t share criminal records with the U.S., making it risky to let travelers in without vetting—many might overstay and vanish into the shadows. Benjamin Jensen at the Center for Strategic and International Studies flags the islands’ strategic spot, with U.S. military ramps up there to counter Beijing’s moves in the Pacific. Smugglers lurking near bases? That smells like reconnaissance ops, testing defenses for bigger plays.
This isn’t just about tourism dollars versus border control; it’s about safeguarding America’s front lines in a tense standoff with a rising rival. The senators’ letter requests a response by January 28, pressing for immediate steps to plug the gap. If ignored, it could leave a pathway open for adversaries to plant roots right under our noses, eroding sovereignty one birth certificate at a time.
Looking broader, similar schemes pop up elsewhere. Senator Scott introduced a bill last November to ban surrogacy for folks from high-risk countries like China, sparked by a California case where a couple had nearly two dozen surrogate babies yanked away amid abuse probes. It’s a pattern: foreign powers gaming our laws to gain footholds. As stewards of this nation, blessed with vast territories from sea to shining sea, we owe it to future generations to close these doors before they swing wide open to threats we can’t yet see.
In the end, the Trump team has a chance to draw a firm line, prioritizing American security over short-term gains. With tensions simmering in the Indo-Pacific, letting the CCP exploit our islands isn’t just careless—it’s inviting trouble we can ill afford.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.