Immigration has become a highly controversial issue with strong sentiment on both sides. Unfortunately, we have allowed our emotions to take over us, at the expense of honest debate. Nowhere is this clearer than with the recent coining of the phrase anchor babies. The term anchor baby refers to a mother who takes advantage of our country’s longstanding belief in birthright citizenship by sneaking across the border and having her child here. Birthright citizenship is the constitutional guarantee that when a person is born within the US, they are automatically a citizen, even if their parents entered illegally.
The term anchor baby was created to infer that illegal immigrants have found a way to circumvent our immigration laws by having a baby here, who is now a citizen. As a citizen, it is falsely claimed that this anchor baby subsequently requests to bring the rest of the family here. It is implied that once here, this family will now take jobs from US citizens or receive welfare and take our tax dollars. The term anchor baby is simply a myth, created to stimulate anti-immigrant ideology for political purposes. The truth is, a US citizen baby cannot help an illegal parent’s immigration. This is because no one can apply for another family member’s green card until they are 21 years old.
Because a so-called anchor baby cannot gain legal status even for his mother until they turn 21, there is little truth to anchor baby terminology – he should be called an anchor young adult anyway. But this is also misleading, if the mother somehow remains in the United States illegally without being caught and deported until the child is 21, that child cannot petition for the mother unless the mother leaves the country. Once the mother leaves the country, a 10-year re-entry ban is triggered as punishment for her unlawful presence. This means that the anchor baby would be 31 when he was able to get his mother or any other family member a green card to the US Thus, the premise that there is an anchor baby is patently false.
Furthermore, birthright citizenship has been a staple of our country for many decades and is clearly and explicitly established in the Constitution. It is entirely possible that without him our country would be completely different and many people here now would not be. Furthermore, there would be serious humanitarian problems if ICE arrested infants and young children and deported them to a country they have never been to.
In short, the term anchor baby was created to arouse human passions and make our citizens feel that our system of laws is being exploited. There is no doubt that our country has serious immigration problems and that something must be done to solve it, but creating false terminology is not the answer.