RE: Riddle me this: are babies born to foreign nationals who are visiting automatically US citizens?
YES. I know of a family who went to Eugene, Oregon from the Philippines as TOURISTS for 6 months.
The wife then was a month before labor. The child was born a month after they arrived and was deemed a US citizen.
Guess what the child’s name is? EUGENE.
The Philippines are an odd sort of duck.
Once a territory of the US (much like Hawaii and Puerto Rico), the natives of the Philippines were, at one time, US subjects, and until the Philippines were given independence in 1946, all citizens of the Philippines were automatically US citizens when they entered US proper.
This sort of went away with independence, but Filipinos were still given preference on entering and applying for citizenship in the US, such as it was. Service in the US military service was enough to establish the necessary residency requirements (but that holds for ALL foreign nationals who enter the US legally).