Over the past year, more than 5,800 pregnant Russian women have flown to Argentina and there were 33 of them, all in the final weeks of pregnancy, on a single plane that landed at Buenos Aires International Airport on Thursday.
Children born in Argentina automatically acquire citizenship, which then becomes quite easy for parents to obtain within a couple of years. Furthermore, those who have a Russian passport can enter the country without a visa. Many Russian families therefore seek to obtain Argentine passports for their children, to compensate for the decrease in the power of their own due to international reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to have greater freedom of movement, given that currently the Argentine passport allows travel for short periods without a visa in 171 countries, including those of the European Union.
It is a widespread habit to the point that there are agencies that have specialized in organizing trips to Argentina for pregnant women, and that in addition to booking flights and transfers from airports, they also take care of Spanish lessons and provide translation services for paperwork . They offer more or less expensive “packages”, starting from a few thousand euros.
This is why the expression “turismo de maternidad”, “maternity tourism” is used: it was a widespread phenomenon in Russia even before the war in Ukraine, but until 2022 the main destination was the United States, another country where acquires citizenship by being born in the national territory and where, however, it is now much more difficult for Russian citizens to arrive.
The Dirección Nacional de Migraciones (DNM), the Argentine government agency that deals with immigration, also speaks of “false tourism” because, upon arrival in Argentina, pregnant women declare that they are traveling precisely for tourist reasons.
On Friday, DNM director Florencia Carignano announced the launch of an investigation into the activity of agencies specializing in this type of travel, defined as a “profitable business”. For Carignano it is problematic that many of the women or families who go to Argentina to give birth do not stop in the country: of the 10,500 people of Russian citizenship who have been in Argentina in the last year, 3,500 have stopped.
However, there are families willing to stay: in January the Guardian had interviewed one and had hypothesized that even Russian men who do not want to fight against Ukraine were interested in moving to Argentina.
Three of the 33 pregnant Russian women who arrived in Buenos Aires on Thursday had been temporarily detained for “problems with documents”, as had already happened to three other women who had arrived the previous day. When asked by the airport authorities, all of them admitted that they had not gone to Argentina for a tourist visit. The lawyer who is representing them, Christian Rubilar, said they could not be detained because there is no crime of “false tourism” and because they have not committed any crimes or violated immigration laws.
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