Fox Business Anchor’s Fixation On Chinese ‘Baby Army’ Has Us Scratching Our Heads

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo seemed very worried about Chinese influence during a Thursday segment, where she wondered if a “little baby army” of foreign nationals was infiltrating the United States.

During an interview with Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), the host of “Mornings with Maria” took issue with Democrats’ attempt to revive their once-thwarted border security bill, and asked if anyone on Capitol Hill is scrutinizing “military-aged men” coming into the country.

In an attempt to bolster her concerns, Bartiromo played a clip of a California man who claims he’s been collecting passports and ID cards that immigrants are allegedly discarding so they can “assume a new identity” in the States.

“These are all military-aged males,” San Diego resident Cory Gautereaux told Fox’s Bill Melugin, pointing to a collection of ID documents pinned to his wall in plastic bags. “People keep saying that. I’ve got the proof right here.”

“So there you go. The passports are right there,” Bartiromo concluded from the clip.

“They’re largely military-aged men. Many from Communist China. A lot of people worried that [Chinese President] Xi Jinping is creating a little baby army here in America,” she went on. “Who’s watching that?”

Davidson used the question to tear into Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his own Democratic peers on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. But Bartiromo wasn’t done speculating about an alleged mini-army.

“I mean, what are we going to do?” she said. “At some point, turn around and say, ‘Oh, wow, we’ve got a million people, military-aged men, and now they’re up in arms and they are creating discontent in America’?”

“Are we just going to say, ‘Oh, wow, look at all these Chinese military-aged men that are in the country. They’re like a little baby army. Wow, we missed that,’” she continued.

Bartiromo’s remarks sounded a lot like accusations that former President Donald Trump made during a campaign rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, last month.

“They’re coming in from China — 31, 32,000 over the last few months — and they’re all military age and they mostly are men,” Trump claimed then. “And it sounds like to me, are they trying to build a little army in our country? Is that what they’re trying to do?”

Reports of Anti-Asian bigotry have conspicuously risen in the U.S. in the past four years, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. About a third of Asian adults in a 2023 Pew Research Center survey said they personally knew “an Asian person in the U.S. who has been threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020.”

The U.S. border has seen a rise in immigration from China in recent years, and while federal figures show that a majority of those newcomers are single adults, the data is not broken down by gender, according to The Associated Press.

Watch Bartiromo’s full remarks above.