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I caught a recent news segment about birth tourism in the U.S. You've probably seen some version of it by now.

The conversation back home has been loud. Who gets to be born American, who's gaming the system, what should be done about it. I'm not wading into that. I write a newsletter. I don't write policy. But somewhere in the middle of that segment, my brain did something weird and flipped the question around.

What if an American did it in reverse?

What if you, holder of the passport everybody supposedly wants, flew somewhere else to have a baby on purpose? Would that make any sense at all?

So I did what I do when a dumb question won't leave me alone. I researched it. The uncomfortable answer is that for a certain kind of family, it makes a surprising amount of sense.

Here's the logic: Most kids born abroad to an American parent are American anyway, through citizenship by descent (there are physical presence rules for the parent, so check yours). A baby born in the right country doesn't swap one passport for another. The kid leaves the hospital with two. And in a few countries, that tiny new citizen opens a door for the parents too.

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not recommending this. I'm not a lawyer. These rules are current as of this writing and they change constantly. Please do not choose where to give birth based on a newsletter. But purely hypothetically, here is my deeply unscientific, top ten ranking.

10. The United States. Home field, zero advantage. Your kid is probably already American through you, so flying home adds no extra passports and one of the most expensive hospital bills on earth. The U.S. does give one parting gift no matter where your baby is born: citizenship-based taxation. Congratulations, your newborn in São Paulo is a future IRS filer.

9. Portugal. The first version of this list had Portugal near the top. Then I checked. Portugal's new nationality law now requires a parent to have five years of legal residence before the birth. It used to be one. Unless you're planning a very long pregnancy, cross it off.

8. Chile. On paper, a dream. Then you read the fine print. Children of "transient foreigners" don't get citizenship at birth, and tourists count as transient. Next.

7. Canada. The simplest version. Unconditional birthright citizenship, no visa for Americans, a short drive for some of you. But no perks for parents, and as a non-resident you'll pay for the hospital like a tourist, because you are one.

6. Panama. Birthright citizenship, the U.S. dollar, a quick flight from Miami. The parent perk comes with a waiting room: you can't apply for residency through your child until they turn five. And on paper, Panama asks naturalized citizens to give up their other nationality. Great for the kid. Complicated for you.

5. Costa Rica. Parents of a Costa Rican child can get permanent residency from the start, which is rare. Citizenship for Americans is a seven-year road, with Spanish and history exams waiting at the end. Pura vida, eventually.

4. Argentina. A year and a half ago this was a contender for the top spot. Then a 2025 decree rewrote the rules. Parents of Argentine-born kids now get temporary residence first, and the two-year clock toward citizenship has to run without interruption. One trip abroad can reset it. Courts have pushed back on parts of the decree, so the ground is still moving. Great steak, shifting rules.

3. Uruguay. The quiet overachiever. A foreign parent of a Uruguayan child can get permanent residence on the family link alone, and a parent with a family established there can apply for citizenship after three years. The catch is you have to actually live there, at least half of every year, and a long absence resets the clock.

2. Mexico. Your kid is Mexican at birth. You can apply for permanent residency with the child's birth certificate, and after two years of residence a parent of a Mexican-born child can apply to naturalize. There's a Spanish and history exam, which feels fair. Excellent private hospitals, no visa for Americans, and you can drive home.

1. Brazil. The gold standard. Your kid is Brazilian, you get residency through them, and Brazil cuts the naturalization wait from four years to one for parents of a Brazilian child. The catches: you actually have to live there that year, you have to speak a little Portuguese, and Americans now need an e-visa just to land. Living there makes you a Brazilian tax resident too. Still, one year to a second passport for the whole family is hard to beat.

Honorable non-mention: Colombia, where I live. Citizenship at birth only applies if a parent has legal domicile here. Tourists leave with a Colombian birth certificate and a great hospital experience, not a passport.

Here's what stayed with me after the rabbit hole. Most Americans treat citizenship like weather. It happened to us, it's where we were born, end of story. Almost every country on this list treats it as something you can build, one residency card and one language exam at a time. You don't need a baby for that. Most of these places have ordinary residency paths anyone can start. The baby just makes the process faster, and a lot louder at 3 AM.

So forget the delivery room for a second. If you could hand your future self one extra door, which country would you want it to open onto?

🇺🇸 U.S. (Inbound / Birth Tourism) - On August 6th, Trump signed two executive orders targeting birth tourism. One bars visas for foreigners suspected of traveling to give birth; the other strips citizenship from babies if either parent engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain it. The Supreme Court struck down his earlier birthright citizenship order in June, and legal challenges to both new orders are already underway.

🇧🇷 Brazil - Still the gold standard for reverse birth tourism: a baby born there gives the American parent a path to residency, and citizenship in as little as one year if you live there that year and speak Portuguese. Americans now need an e-visa to enter, and living there triggers Brazilian tax residency - but one year to a second passport for the family remains hard to beat anywhere in the world.

🇲🇽 Mexico - Quietly raised its residency income thresholds to $4,200/month (temporary) and $7,000/month (permanent) this year, making the old route harder for Social Security-only retirees - but parents of a Mexican-born child can still apply for permanent residency via that family link, and the two-year naturalization path for parents remains intact.

🇵🇹 Portugal - Good news buried in the backlog: AIMA processing times are showing real improvement in 2026 after years of stagnation. For new Golden Visa applicants the program is unchanged at €500,000 fund route or €250,000 cultural donation, with seven days minimum stay per year and permanent residence available after five years.

🇪🇸 Spain - Golden Visa has been closed since April 2025. Investors still interested in Spain are now navigating entrepreneur and innovation routes, and the Non-Lucrative Visa at €2,400/month income remains the cleanest retirement option. ETIAS pre-authorization, repeatedly delayed, is now expected to launch in early 2027 rather than Q4 2026.

🇦🇪 UAE - Expanded its Golden Visa this year to include nurses with 15 or more years of experience and exceptional educators, in addition to existing investor, talent, and real estate routes. Ten-year visas for top-tier talent, five-year for real estate investors, all without a sponsor requirement.

🇨🇦 Canada - Still the simplest birthright citizenship destination for Americans: unconditional jus soli, no visa required, straightforward border crossing for most. No benefit for parents and hospital costs run high as a non-resident, but the baby gets a Canadian passport cleanly.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

You might know John Green two ways. One is as the writer of The Fault in Our Stars, which means he has already sat through enough Hollywood meetings to know exactly where the bodies are buried. The other is as one half of Vlogbrothers, the YouTube channel he's run with his brother Hank for going on two decades now, one of the original proof-of-concepts that you could build a real audience on the internet and then do something with it.

What Hollywood, Ending proves is that beyond all of that, what John Green really is, is a writer.

The book follows Juniper Castillo, a former child actor grinding to be taken seriously as an adult, and Kai, a handsome newcomer whose untold history as a sexual abuse survivor gets weaponized by a PR machine that turns him into a hero he never asked to be. The two of them are cast in a buzzy Andy Warhol biopic and the whole thing, the fame, the attention economy, the maybe-relationship being teased in the press for marketing purposes, starts to swallow them.

I worked in Hollywood. I have hired these PR people. I have been in these rooms. Everything Green describes rings completely true, down to what people make, how agents operate, the dance of magazine interviews and the hangover IVs, the meetings at Hotel Bel-Air, the namedroppers so practiced they have elevated it to an art form, the audio guy getting annoyed at planes overhead.

Green is one of those writers who makes the mundane specifically interesting. Old school in the best way. He meanders with purpose. The character psychology is precise.

This one is worth your time.

Buy here.

Spend any time with Colombian film and you'll run into Víctor Gaviria. His 1998 La vendedora de rosas just landed on Netflix (spending the last two weeks in the top 10), and it's the place to start. It follows a group of street kids in Medellín who sell roses at night, mostly to buy “sacol,” the glue they sniff to get through it. Gaviria cast kids from the streets instead of actors, and you feel it in every frame. Nobody here gets a childhood. They go from babies to adults overnight, through violence that comes as often from each other as from the city.

By the end, you almost understand the glue. When life is that hard and that short, a cheap high starts to look like the only thing on the menu. A large part of the cast has since died or ended up in prison. Its star, Lady Tabares, walked the red carpet at Cannes at 16 and spent the next decade and change in prison. And now she’s a reality star.

Because that’s how that works.

It's an amazing film. You will cry.

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