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Because paying someone to work as a surrogate is illegal in New York, many of the carriers come from poorer parts of the United States: Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Alabama, North Carolina. Reproductive labor is a growth industry, and the workers downstairs are lining up to apply for the job. Upstairs, by contrast, the wealthy couples who will employ them often come from China, one of the fastest-growing markets for surrogate pregnancies. No one knows precisely how many Chinese citizens travel to the United States each year for surrogacy, but fertility specialists say the demand is skyrocketing. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” John Weltman, the founder of Circle Surrogacy, told CNN. “It’s like an explosion.” Fertility Source, a California agency, has hired a full-time employee to handle Chinese travel and translation. “Everyone is doing that,” says Gail Sexton Anderson, who runs Donor Concierge, an organization in California that connects carriers and families.

The influx of Chinese citizens seeking surrogates in the United States reflects, in part, the growing wealth and mobility of urban professionals in China. It has also been spurred by China’s decision to rescind its One Family One Child policy last year, allowing straight, married couples to pursue larger families. But it can take monthsto get into a fertility clinic in China, and both egg donation and surrogacy remain illegal. At the same time, countries like Thailand and India began to prohibit foreigners from hiring surrogates or outlawed the practice altogether. So Chinese couples in search of a surrogate followed the inexorable logic of globalization: They went looking for a ready supply of labor overseas.

With surrogacy banned throughout the EU and heavily regulated in the U.K., Canada, and Australia, the best source of “carriers” became the United States. Americans are accustomed to the idea of paying for cheap goods made in China. But in this case, money flowed out of China and into America. Agencies sprang up across China promising to help Chinese parents find blonde, blue-eyed American women to bear their children. “They basically do everything,” says Gloria Li, the Asia specialist for Donor Concierge. “Transportation, translation, help you to find a clinic, make the appointment for you. When you have the baby, they even provide a house in the United States where you can stay—all in one package.” At the very moment when Donald Trump is vowing to take a hard line with China and to bring working-class jobs back to America, Chinese couples are employing American women to perform the world’s original form of labor….

Gestational surrogacy costs around $100,000. Of that, surrogates take home an average $30,000 to $35,000, with a bonus if they carry multiple pregnancies. The remainder of the money goes to the middlemen involved in the transaction, covering agency fees, legal fees, counseling services, and health insurance. If you do the math, the standard surrogacy fee works out to around $5 per hour for the duration of the pregnancy.Surrogates are often paid higher fees to work with foreign I.P.s—particularly from China, where the language barrier and distance make it difficult to stay in touch after the child is born. “Surrogates typically don’t want to carry for Chinese couples, because they want a relationship with the parents,” explains Janae Krell, the founder of the advocacy group All Things Surrogacy.