Birth tourism scams draw sweeping crackdown as visa revocations climb
By Adele Rutherford ·
The procedure by which power operates—that is where one must look when assessing American law.
When the Rule of Law Becomes a Tool for Exclusion
The procedure by which power operates—that is where one must look when assessing American law. What we are seeing now, however, is not jurisprudence; it is bureaucratic muscle flexing in a manner that chills the very concept of due process. The current administration’s preparation to revoke up to 200,000 nonimmigrant visas—B1 for business and B2 for tourism—is nothing short of an unprecedented systemic purge. According to reports from The Punch and Yonhap, this action targets foreigners who entered the US as short-term visitors but subsequently filed for asylum. State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott stated that they are "coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently."
The legal rationale offered by Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau—that “Asylum isn’t supposed to be a loophole to circumvent immigration law”—is intellectually dishonest. It is an attempt to reframe established statutory rights as procedural failures. The administration has spent years tightening the screws, introducing visa bond requirements and increasing scrutiny of social media activity, all under the guise of "process." But when the process itself becomes weaponized against entire categories of people based on their need for protection, it ceases being governance and becomes state-sanctioned exclusion.
Targeting Status, Not Conduct
The mechanism at play here is not merely visa revocation; it is the systematic stripping of legal status from an entire group defined by a shared action—seeking asylum while holding temporary visitor visas. The Times of India noted that these revocations would not automatically lead to immediate deportation, but rather that the holders would lose their B1 or B2 status while their cases are considered. This distinction is critical: they are using administrative fiat to cut off basic legal standing.
This pattern echoes one of history’s most brutal mechanisms of exclusion: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That law used federal power not merely to regulate borders, but to systematically deny residency and citizenship rights to an entire national group based on perceived origin. The shared mechanism is clear: using established legal tools—in this case, visa status—to define a class of people as fundamentally illegitimate or transient, regardless of their actual need for protection. When the state uses its procedural power to treat an entire category of asylum seekers as if they were inherently fraudulent from the outset, it replicates that historical pattern of targeted dispossession.
The Illusion of Procedural Integrity
The administration’s insistence on defining this crackdown as a necessary tightening of rules ignores the foundational American commitment to due process. To suggest that a person's temporary status is forfeit simply because their path to safety involves navigating complex immigration law is to fundamentally misunderstand what legitimacy means. Legitimacy, once spent, cannot be recovered by decree.
The history books are replete with examples where procedural shortcuts have been used to justify profound injustice. The current government’s actions do not signal a robust defense of American law; they telegraph a return to the era when federal power was wielded against specific groups without regard for individual rights or due process. They mistake bureaucratic convenience for constitutional necessity, and in doing so, they betray the very principles that were supposed to safeguard this republic.