"Merely having a baby on American soil doesn't doesn't give foreign parents a foothold."

[pampango]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lee-anchor-baby-20100908,0,5549948.story

I was an 'anchor baby'; Merely having a baby on American soil doesn't doesn't give foreign parents a foothold, as 14th Amendment opponents often imply.

I was an "anchor baby." According to family lore, the day I was born at Hibbing Memorial Hospital in Minnesota in the early 1960s was also the day my parents received their deportation papers. They had come to America from war-torn Korea on student visas that had run out. Laws at the time prohibited most Asians from immigrating, so they were told to leave, even with three American children.

The 14th Amendment, with its guarantee that anyone born here is an American, protected my siblings and me from being countryless. Today, in the growing clamor over illegal immigration, there have been calls to repeal this amendment, with the pejorative "anchor baby" invoked as a call to arms. The words suggest that having a child in America confers some kind of legal protection on illegal parents, that it gives them a foothold here.

But in reality, merely having a baby on American soil doesn't change the parents' status. As a so-called anchor baby, my existence did nothing to resolve my parents' situation; if anything, it only added to their stress.

In 1924, the Immigration and Naturalization Act established quotas that heavily favored "desirable" Western Europeans while banning immigration from Japan, Korea and other Asian countries. Had my father been from Germany — like his anesthesiologist friend in Duluth, also toiling away at a job American doctors eschewed — citizenship would have happened easily. The same if my father had been from Mexico, as the act placed no quota restrictions on immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere.

As a writer, I receive letters from readers who tell me how my work has touched, even changed, their lives; as a child, I often heard my father's patients expressing similar sentiments of gratitude. Even the most anti-immigrant citizens have probably been touched by an illegal alien and/or an anchor baby in ways they probably cannot fully fathom.

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Puleeze.

You are making too much sense.
and logical stuff also , too.

You know it is all about keeping the ramped up.

Esp. against the "different other".

[bluethruandthru]

2. "anchor baby" is another repuke term that's taken hold

in this country and whatever lies the right decides to attach to that term will become "truth".
Just the same way they took "Acorn" and turned it into an organization dedicated solely to stealing elections from repubs.
The same way they turned a muslim community center in New York into the "Ground Zero Mosque".

It never ends....

[pnorman]

3. Thanks for bring that article to my (our) attention!

n/t

[Warpy]

4. The more you point out to them that minor children get deported

along with their parents unless family members here legally can take them, the more they insist that having a baby on US soil entitles an illegal immigrant to permanent residence and permanent welfare benefits, the latter something that Americans can't get and "IT AINT FAIR!"

They just stop listening at some point, their eyes glaze over, and they mindlessly parrot all the talking points their AM radios have blatted into their ears nonstop.

The truth about the "anchor baby" is that the only one with an anchor is the baby and it can only be deployed if that baby grows up and wants to come here legally and that's generally a big "if" since that baby knows how his or her parents were treated by this country. Bigots just can't comprehend this, at all, and keep repeating their talking points like some sort of sick mantra.

I've come to the conclusion that the only thing you can do with such parrots is laugh at them and walk away. It won't stop their mindless adherence to the AM radio cult, but it might shut them up in public and create a more civil society.

[unblock]

5. exactly -- they're trained to dismiss facts but respond on an emotional level

they are able to dismiss facts because they see them EMOTIONALLY as an attack on their position (and hence their identity and loyalties and so on). so you must attack their ideas EMOTIONALLY in order to get anything to register.

laughter and humiliation is the best weapon. if they feel like fools to listen to limbaugh or beck, that does VASTLY more than any intellectual argument could possibly accomplish.

[dkf]

6. Isnt it amazing that Asians have the most reason to gripe about unfair treatment

Yet you rarely hear a peep. Only one little memoir type article.

[felix_numinous]

7. We are all at least descendants of anchor babies

but we were here first....wait...uh....