U.S. Babies Couriered to China for $1,000

In a surprising trend that's just come to light, more than half of Chinese immigrant mothers surveyed in New York are sending their babies back to China, a new study reveals.

Facing substantial debt and six-day workweeks, the majority of mothers - many of them illegal aliens - said the lack of affordable child care in the city forced them to send their babies to relatives in China for the children's early years.

Business cards printed in Chinese can be found littered around the streets of Chinatown offering to courier babies to China for about $1,000, the New York Sun reports.

The study, "Prolonged Separation Among Chinese Immigrant Families in New York City," was based on interviews with 219 pregnant women using prenatal services at health clinics in Manhattan's Chinatown and in Flushing, Queens.

Lead researcher Henry Chung, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University, found that 57 percent of the women surveyed at the clinics - who tend to be poorer and more recent immigrants than the overall Chinese population in New York - are being forced by economic necessity to send babies to China soon after birth.

One Chinese woman, an illegal immigrant, told the Sun she plans to send her infant daughter Angela to live with her grandparents in a small town in Fujian Province four months after her birth.

"I would love to be able to look at her face every day, but financially I can't have her," the woman, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment she shares with another family, said through a translator.

"I have to go back to work."

Since arriving in the U.S., the woman and her husband have worked at least 12 hours a day to pay off the $50,000 debt they owe to smugglers.

"For Angela, to move to China is the best for her future," the new mom said. "This way my husband can save money for our own place when she comes back."

Illegal immigrants whose children are born in the U.S. can qualify for subsidized child care, but many are afraid to provide proof of employment and worry about revealing their immigration status.

Private day care is far too expensive for most of the immigrants.

Children often return to America in time for kindergarten. But some face problems learning English, adjusting to American culture and relating to their parents, whom they have often spoken to only on the phone.

"They need time to adjust because their grandparents spoiled them in China," said a family worker at a school in Chinatown - where about a third of the pre-kindergarten class lived in China before returning to America.