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State to Save Millions Closing Visa Offices Across Africa
Marco Rubio’s State Department will slash the number of U.S. offices in Africa processing visas for foreigners seeking to come to the United States. The almost 50 U.S. embassies and consulates that are currently processing visa applications will be reduced to 20 to take advantage of economies of scale. This will save taxpayer dollars maintaining offices and staff that mostly just refuse visas anyway, as well as likely slow the number of Africans who secure visas only to overstay in America. Donald Trump haters will call this racism. Supporters will call it saving taxpayer money.
The United States currently issues and refuses both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas at some 50 posts across Africa (out of 54 countries there.) Immigrant visas (IVs), also known as green cards, represent a relatively small amount of the business. The way immigrant visas are typically refused in Africa (officially called 221g) multiple times before finally being issued, sometimes years after the process started (as if your “Incomplete” in sophomore English Composition was still hanging over you years after graduation), the refusal rates appear artificially high and make for bad statistical comparisons. Also, the Donald Trump administration in January 2026 already suspended all immigrant visa processing for 26 African countries anyway, so these visas really are not of much concern here with this new development.
The nonimmigrant visas (NIVs) in Africa, mostly tourist visas, are overwhelmingly refused. To avoid complaints, the State Department closely holds actual refusal numbers per post. However, State is required to release refusal statistics by nationality, and that tells the tale. Some of the highest rates in Africa are Liberians 78.2 percent, Somalis 77 percent, Burundis 65.5 percent, and Beninese 61.5 percent, and Chadians 58.6 percent. And those numbers are pre-Trump II. In comparison, the historical refusal rates for most European countries were so low (below three percent) that the U.S. used that in part to give up even requiring visas from them years ago.
It is hard to say what the point of maintaining a visa office in a far-flung part of Africa is just to say “no” over and over again. State’s standard reply has to do with maintaining good relations with the host country (questionable on the face when there are so many refusals and immigrant visa processing is shut down completely). This also hints at an answer to why the U.S. has so many embassies and consulates in countries that arguably have little to do. Much of this network was established during the Cold War, when Washington viewed newly independent African states as key battlegrounds in its global competition with the Soviet Union. As African countries gained independence, both the United States and the USSR sought political influence, military access, and votes in international organizations. Establishing embassies also allowed the Americans to monitor Soviet activities and USAID contractors of varying sobriety and propriety. Although the Cold War ended in 1991, the diplomatic infrastructure remained in place as State resisted moves toward regional “hub” embassies brought about by the “peace dividend.” State currently still seeks to justify the mass of embassies, claiming they are there to counter the usurious Chinese Belt and Road Initiative without really explaining how they do that. Movie nights?
No need to worry, however, about the small percentage of Africans who might have succeeded in obtaining nonimmigrant visas in their home countries. Some 20 U.S. visas posts will remain open, and the applicants can apply there. The “closed” visa posts will still assist American Citizens and process special national interest visa cases and diplomatic applications. As for the rest, few African capitals have direct flights to the U.S. mainland anyway, so many travelers can apply enroute. Applicants must travel internationally to reach the United States anyway, so requiring some of them to travel to regional visa hubs is not an unreasonable burden. It’s an old system anyway; during my time processing visas in London, the embassy reserved a number of appointments for Iranian citizens, who would fly in on a weekly Swiss Air flight, get their visa, and head off to New York even as the U.S. maintained no diplomatic relations with Tehran.
There are two main reasons to shut down these African visa posts. Refusal rates are high enough to question maintaining separate processing facilities in every country. Maintaining an American diplomat overseas to process visas is expensive. He needs government housing, an office, a local staff, administrative support, security escorts, transportation, language training, education allowances for children, hardship and danger pay, and more (some of which albeit are fixed costs even if personnel headcount decreases), plus the actual sunk costs of his salary, benefits, and pension. There is no single official figure because costs vary widely by country, rank, and family size.
However, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the State Department spent about $3.1 billion on pay, benefits, and allowances for roughly 9,000 U.S. direct-hire employees serving overseas in FY 2023. That works out to an average of about $344,000 per overseas employee per year. An earlier 2006 GAO study estimated the cost of placing a U.S. Foreign Service officer overseas at approximately $400,000 annually. None of this even tries to calculate the lost cost of having that expensively-trained diplomat spend his time saying no to visas in Monrovia when he could be working on much more critical issues in Beijing.
The other reason to shut down these visa issuing posts is because it will likely slow down the number of visas issued to African travelers and thus the number of visa overstays in the U.S. Because the U.S. does not comprehensively track overstays, there is no single, reliable headcount. However, the best source is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Entry/Exit Overstay Report, which calculates overstay rates by nationality for visitors admitted as business or tourist travelers. It shows overstays for Africans ranged from a high of 49 percent for Chadians, to five percent for Ghana. Keep in mind this rate is not the percentage of a country’s citizens living illegally in the United States (no one knows that number because the census cannot by law ask about citizenship status). It is the percentage of a specific year’s visitor admissions that DHS could not confirm departed on time. Considering over 20,000 tourist visas are issued per year most every year just for Ghanaians, even five percent overstay by them represents a large and ever-growing number of actual people.
So what do we call the shutdown of visa posts in Africa? A good start.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Green Card Take-Away from Mahmoud Khalil
Whether you believe Mahmoud Khalil deserves to be deported for his anti-Semitic stance while a student at Columbia University, or whether you believe he was righteously exercising his First Amendment rights there, his green card revocation stinks. It is a perfect example of “we told you so” about powers granted so freely to the government, in this case by a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 covering deportable aliens and a similar one covering American citizens.
Donald Trump made it clear Khalil was arrested and his green card revoked because of his activism. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump in a Truth Social post. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.” The actions against Khalil are of a set; Axios reported on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to use AI to comb the social media accounts of student visa holders in a search of terrorist sympathies. The administration is determined to make an example of Columbia, announcing it was canceling $400 million in grants with the school. It has also warned 60 other colleges of possible anti-Semitism penalties.
In Khalil’s case, following a habeaous corpus petition filed by his lawyers, Khalil was granted a hearing challenging his arrest. The judge did not make any immediate decisions about his detention. He did temporarily bar the government from removing Khalil from the United States.
The significant First Amendment issues aside for now (a big aside) Khalil’s green card was revoked under a little-used part of immigration law. The Government of the United States can take away green cards from legal permanent residents, as well as student visas, if “The Secretary of State determines that the applicant’s activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.” If the government feels it is against its interest for you to have a card or visa and thus the freedom to travel, to enter and depart the United States if you wish to, it will just take it away. The law allows them to do this prospectively, the “or are likely to cause…” part of the law, meaning you don’t need to have done anything. The government just needs to decide that you might.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Khalil of participating in protests that he described as anti-Semitic and supportive of Hamas. Foreigners who come to the United States and do such things, he said, will have their visas or green cards revoked and be kicked out. “This is not about free speech,” Rubio said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
It does not stop with aliens. The Secretary of State may also order the revocation of any U.S. passport for national security reasons, same as Khalil’s green card, albeit without the looming penalty of deportation. The legal authority for the U.S. Secretary of State is primarily found in 22 U.S. Code § 211a and 22 U.S. Code § 2705.
One of the most noteworthy cases of an ordered revocation based on the Secretary of State’s fiat was Phillip Agee. Agee, an ex-intelligence officer, in the 1970’s exposed CIA officers identities. According to the Supreme Court, “In 1974, Agee called a press conference in London to announce his ‘campaign to fight the United States CIA wherever it is operating.’ He declared his intent ‘to expose CIA officers and agents and to take the measures necessary to drive them out of the countries where they are operating.'” Agee, by his own assertion, devoted consistent effort to that plan, and traveled extensively to other countries to carry it out.
Agee’s case prompted the Supreme Court to review the Department of State’s ability to revoke U.S. passports simply because the government didn’t want someone to hold one for “national security” reasons. The Court upheld the government’s ability to do so after lower courts said no. The Court stated that “The right to hold a passport is subordinate to national security and foreign policy considerations.”
That last sentence took on chilling new meaning in the case of Anwar Al-Awlaki. We learned via a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act request that prior to having him and his 16-year-old son murdered via drone in 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton secretly revoked their passports, as Al-Awlaki was a Qaeda propagandist, and U.S. Citizen. The State Department tried to invite al-Awlaki into the U.S. Embassy in Yemen so they could hand him a letter announcing the revocation and so that they could encourage him to return to the U.S. to face charges. Six months later (al-Awlaki never dropped by the Embassy, by the way), the U.S. Government simply killed him. Two weeks later it killed his 16-year-old son via another drone strike.
Though the exact details of these types of revocation cases are classified, they typically fall under the broader legal framework of U.S. foreign relations and counterterrorism policies. In recent years, court challenges have been brought by individuals whose passports or visas were revoked. For example, individuals who have been denied passports or had them revoked argue violations of due process or freedom of movement. However, the courts tend to defer to the government in national security cases, allowing the executive branch wide discretion in handling these issues.
Depending on how his lawyers wish to present the case, Khalil’s revocation may end up at the Supreme Court as a First Amendment issue. It depends, like the old joke, which came first, the chicken or the egg. If the Court is willing to see the result of the revocation — the silencing of Kahlil and thus denial of his free speech rights — as predominant, new free speech legal ground may be broken and the deportation stayed. However, if the Court were to take the position this is just another national security case to be handled by an immigration judge and the revocation thus not reaching to offending the First Amendment (likely) Khalil will simply be deported under the sweeping, long-standing powers granted to the government to control the travel of both aliens and American citizens.
That will leave the biggest issue of the case unresolved. There are so many reasons not to listen to an anti-Semite like Khalil, but few to justify silencing him with an overly-broad law that pends on the Secretary of State’s personal decree. We are not obligated to defend Khalil’s beliefs, but are required to defend his rights. The responsibility for bringing that to the fore will ultimately rest with the Supreme Court if not with this case then the next..
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Chinese Baby Factories Exploit Birthright Citizenship
Even before taking office, Trump’s influence is being felt on birthright citizenship. ICE, taking advantage of Biden’s absence as a leader, saw a California man sentenced to over 3 years in prison for running a business called USA Happy Baby that helped pregnant Chinese women travel to the United States to deliver babies who would automatically get American citizenship.
USA Happy Baby helped several hundred women travel from China to give birth to American citizen babies. The “tourists” paid as much as $40,000 for services including apartment rentals during their stays in Southern California and worked with overseas entities that coached women on what to say during visa interviews and upon arriving in U.S. airports, advising them among other things to wear loose clothing to hide their pregnancies.
“For tens of thousands of dollars each, defendant helped his numerous customers deceive U.S. authorities and buy U.S. citizenship for their children,” federal prosecutors wrote in court papers. USA Happy Baby worked with a multi-million dollar adjacent business called You Win USA which further coached pregnant Chinese women on how to get into the United States. Another business, Star Baby Care, boasted of bringing over 8,000 Chinese women to the U.S. to give birth. The businesses operate openly, and advertise freely in Chinese-language media both here and abroad. It is big business. Yet many of the women, lacking U.S. health insurance, gave birth as public charges using public funds.
Such businesses have long operated in California, Florida, and other states and have catered to people not only from China, but also from Russia, Nigeria, Korea, and elsewhere. It isn’t illegal to visit the United States while pregnant, but lying to consular and immigration officials about the reason for travel is when the primary purpose is to give birth in the U.S. is. Birth travel is driven by birthright citizenship, and Donald Trump wants to do away with both of them.
“I see this as a grave national security concern and vulnerability,” said Mark Zito, assistant special agent-in-charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Are some of them doing it for security because the United States is more stable? Absolutely. But will those governments take advantage of this? Yes, they will.”
So what is birthright citizenship? A child born in the United States (with limited exceptions) to a foreign citizen, legally or illegally present in the U.S., is by virtue of the 14th Amendment (the so-called Citizenship Clause) automatically and forever an American citizen. The child need only prove he was born in the U.S. At the age of 21 the child can begin filing green card paperwork for his extended family. The single American citizen in a family becomes the “anchor” through which all can eventually become legal permanent residents of the U.S. and soon after, citizens.
The 14th was adopted in 1868, in the aftermath of the Civil War as part of reconciling the status of millions of slaves brought to the United States. The Citizenship Clause specifically overruled the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had held that Americans descended from African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The Amendment cleared up any ambiguities, stating “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The most significant test of the 14th Amendment came in 1898, via United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The Supreme Court upheld a child born in the United States automatically became a U.S. citizen. At issue were laws passed after the Wong child’s birth that excluded Chinese citizens from entering the U.S. The decision in Wong is understood to mean that the legal status of the mother, as well as any secondary immigration laws below the Constitution, have no bearing on the granting of citizenship.
Doing away with birthright citizenship is another of Trump’s proclaimed Day One initiatives. In a campaign post, Trump wrote “On Day One, President Trump will sign an Executive Order to stop federal agencies from granting automatic U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. It will explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment, that U.S. Citizenship extends only to those both born in and ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States.”
The Trump campaign also said it would order on Day One the Social Security Administration to refuse Social Security numbers to newborn children without proof of the parents’ immigration status. Trump will issue the same order to the State Department, which issues U.S. passports. This would not require any action from Congress and because it would not grant/take away citizenship per se, would not directly violate the 14th Amendment in Trump’s interpretation.
Currently, a U.S. birth certificate is all that is needed to obtain a Social Security number and passport in most cases. The State Department considers U.S.-born children of illegal aliens to be subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus to have citizenship at birth. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual takes the position Wong settled this issue. This means the Trump E.O. would likely be challenged immediately in lower courts and the case would be ripe for the Supreme Court to use to revisit Wong if they wished to. The Court could rule classes of foreigners on U.S. soil such as tourists (included already are children of foreign diplomats) are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore their children, if born in this country, are not entitled to citizenship. The Court could also side with long precedent and refuse to even hear the case.
Another option for Trump would be to re-issue and this time enforce an Executive Order from Trump 1.0. Under this E.O., visitors can be denied temporary tourist visas if it’s found the “primary purpose” of their travel is to obtain citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States. The rule does not currently apply to the 39 countries in the Visa Waiver Program, including Korea, and State in implementing the E.O. forbids its visa officers from even asking in most cases if an applicant is pregnant, making the order near-impossible to enforce. A revised E.O., which refines “tourism” to exclude planning to give birth in the U.S., extends the exclusion to the Visa Waiver Program, applies equally to ICE at the Ports of Entry, and prohibits the State Department from defanging the law in its implementing guidance, could go a long way toward at least slowing the flood of pregnant visitors to the U.S.
Trump could also order ICE to more aggressively pursue the baby facilitators now actively at work in the U.S., places like USA Happy Baby and You Win USA. ICE could productively look into how the organizations move money internationally, likely to find something akin to money laundering and tax evasion, even if the immigration laws themselves are too weak to hold up in court on a large scale.
What Trump cannot do is wipe away the 14th Amendment, and it is possible his other efforts to slow birth tourism will ultimately fail on this point. Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan in 2018 said “As a conservative, I’m a believer in following the plain text of the Constitution, and I think in this case the 14th Amendment is pretty clear, and that would involve a very, very lengthy constitutional process. But where we obviously totally agree with the president is getting at the root issue here, which is unchecked illegal immigration.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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