Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle

[groovedaddy]

NOGALES, Ariz. — Of the 50 or so women bused to this border town on a recent morning to be deported back to Mexico, Inez Vasquez stood out. Eight months pregnant, she had tried to trudge north in her fragile state, even carrying scissors with her in case she gave birth in the desert and had to cut the umbilical cord.

“All I want is a better life,” she said after the Border Patrol found her hiding in bushes on the Arizona side of the border with her husband, her young son and her very pronounced abdomen.

The next big immigration battle centers on illegal immigrants’ offspring, who are granted automatic citizenship like all other babies born on American soil. Arguing for an end to the policy, which is rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, immigration hard-liners describe a wave of migrants like Ms. Vasquez stepping across the border in the advanced stages of pregnancy to have what are dismissively called “anchor babies.”

The reality at this stretch of the border is more complex, with hospitals reporting some immigrants arriving to give birth in the United States but many of them frequent border crossers with valid visas who have crossed the border legally to take advantage of better medical care. Some are even attracted by an electronic billboard on the Mexican side that advertises the services of an American doctor and says bluntly, “Do you want to have your baby in the U.S.?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/us/politics/05babies.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

[dkf]

1. I bet I'm the only one who thinks it is wrong of these women to cross the border to give birth.

Sigh.

[atreides1]

2. How so

Wrong, as in putting the life of the child at risk?

Wrong, as in having the child here in the US?

Or both?

[dkf]

3. Both.

I also think it's wrong to leave your children without a country and to make them lie about their identification.

[groovedaddy]

4. Judge however you will. When people are desperate, with very limited options, they will try

anything to better their circumstances. NAFTA is a huge driver generating these circumstances, as is the reluctance of the Federal government to crack down on employers.

[BlueMTexpat]

6. You are probably NOT the only one. But I personally think that

it is not wrong for ANY mother to do the best she can to improve circumstances for her children. If that means going to another country, even illegally, to give birth so as to give her child greater opportunities for success in life, I can not condemn her for doing so. In another era, my own ancestors came to the US - and yes, some even came "illegally" - although since they were Anglo-Europeans and via the Canadian border, there was no big fuss. In fact, they were even welcomed. My Irish ancestors were not welcomed as warmly.

IMO, this whole "anchor baby" dialogue is racist at bottom.

[awoke_in_2003]

10. +1000. nt

[dkf]

11. I don't think so.

My friend got married to a girl of my own race who was here illegally because her student visa was over. I never understood why she wanted a child so badly and so soon after they got married, but several years later after she filed for divorce it all fell into place. He married her after dating for less than a year because otherwise she had to leave. And he had to give her the residence and a settlement and alimony or he was never going to see his son again or so she said.

It's not about race for me. Its about cheating.

[BlueMTexpat]

12. It looks as if that marriage, begun for whatever

reason, lasted at least as long as the average US marriage. You explain that the divorce happened "several years later." It's just possible that the baby was a love child, that it wasn't about cheating at all, and that there were real issues between the couple.

Nice try. But statistics rather than your secondhand experience bear out that it's still principally about race - and occasionally about politics. Look at how immigration was facilitated for groups - principally white - from Eastern Europe and the former SSRs - and how Cubans, for example, are welcomed/given asylum, while Haitians largely are not.

[Ozymanithrax]

5. It's wrong to want a better life for their children?

As a parent, I undrstand their desire.

[cloudbase]

7. Complaint of the year:

The legal theories are lost on Laura Gomez, 24, who crossed into Arizona from Mexico five years ago while expecting and is now pregnant with her second child. But like many other pregnant women in Arizona who are without papers, she has been following the issue with anxiety.

“It doesn’t seem fair to just change the rules like that,” Ms. Gomez said.

[athena]

8. The problem is the creation of a permanent class of U.S.-born non-citizens.

If you make it so that a person born in the U.S. is not automatically a U.S. citizen, you will eventually end up with second- and third-generation "illegal" immigrants. You will have people who were born in the U.S., and have never lived anywhere but in the U.S., who are nonetheless "illegal immigrants" with no clear path to U.S. citizenship because their parents were not U.S. citizens.

This is the way things are in many if not all European countries. The end result is large groups of people who remain at the margins of society. Take the German Turks, for example: they were brought into Germany in the 1960s as temporary laborers and were expected to leave after several years. The grand-children of these people are still considered foreigners, even though they may not even speak Turkish. Similarly, thanks to a recent referendum in Switzerland (which many people cluelessly applauded here on DU), a person who was born in Switzerland to non-Swiss parents and spent all her life in Switzerland will be automatically deported to the country of origin of her ancestors if she commits a benefit fraud or a crime such as drug dealing. (Before the referendum, the decision to deport would have been made on a case-by-case basis.) Is this what Americans want in the U.S.?

Women illegally crossing the border to give birth in the U.S. is not a major problem. Trying to solve it would create much larger problems. One of the strengths of the U.S. compared to Europe is how well American culture absorbs and integrates foreigners. Changing the law on birth-right citizenship would be like destroying a beautiful vase because it has a small hairline crack in it.

[BlueMTexpat]

9. I agree totally with what you say.

As a Swiss resident, I was extremely sorry to see the referendum you mentioned pass and I share your sentiments about "clueless" DUers (if not clueless, then clearly not worthy to call themselves "liberal" because they don't understand what the word means) who cheered its passage. My main comfort is that, in the French-speaking Swiss cantons where I live, the referendum was not successful. The French-speaking cantons, on the whole, are much more liberal than the German and Italian-speaking cantons. They are also literally going gangbusters economically.

There is also some comfort in that the referendum, as passed, is effectively unenforceable. The sad thing is that at least some Swiss voters are at least as clueless as are our Tea Baggers. They were taken in by the RW's inflammatory rhetoric rather than the practical aspects.

[treestar]

13. +10000

It would just create more trouble than it is worth in the long run.

People are just being dumb about this. What problem would they solve? They would only create larger problems.

[BridgeTheGap]

14. The obvious simple solution (used before) is to go after companies that hire people who don't have a

legal right to work here. But business reigns supreme in the U.S. now, so the lumpen proletariat, regardless of origin, are all fair game. Just like welfare cheats getting an undue amount of attention while big-time contractors are robbing us blind and no one in power seems to care.