The Immigration Crisis: Now, The ‘Anchor Baby’ Bills

Posted By | June 15th, 2010 | Category: Hot Topics | 2 comments Print This Post Print This Post

By Lee A. Daniels

The Arizona politicos who produced that state’s SB1070 law – the racial profiling bill – as their answer to the country’s confused immigration procedures now want to deny U.S. citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants born in the state.

They’re not alone. Similar bills have been proposed in at least two other states and in Congress the “Birthright Citizenship Act” would apply that rule to the entire country.

In effect, these proposed bills would declare that the key provision of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment to the Constitution – that all individuals born in the U.S. are automatically citizens of the U.S. – doesn’t apply to the newborns of undocumented Latino immigrants. Congress enacted the amendment after the war in order to protect the rights of newly-freed African-Americans, but the Supreme Court has consistently declared that it applies to children born to foreign nationals in the U.S. as well.

If enacted, such bills will undoubtedly wind up before the Supreme Court, as is expected of SB 1070, which is slated to take effect later this summer.

Proponents of these laws call the American-born children of undocumented immigrants “anchor babies” because, they contend, the automatic grant of citizenship to the child has helped draw huge numbers of Latinos from other countries to cross into the U.S. illegally.

Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, the chief sponsor of SB 1070, told Time Magazine that the 14th Amendment has been “hijacked” by undocumented immigrants in “an orchestrated effort by them to come here and have children to gain access to the great welfare state we’ve created.”

The Congressional legislation, which has been proposed several times in recent years, would grant citizenship to the child only if one of the parents was a citizen or foreign national legally in the country or a foreign national on active duty in the U.S. military.

However, Rob Randhava, of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who believes such legislation un-Constitutional, also said they would create enormous social turmoil because “denying citizenship to children would simply increase the number of people here who live outside the law – and it’s unrealistic to think they’d be deported or driven out en masse.”

It would “raise countless practical questions,” he added. “Would hospitals have to decide which mothers are here legally? Would children of those children, and their grandchildren, also be deemed illegal? If so, would the resulting modern-day caste system help, or heighten, the concerns that native-born workers have about immigrant labor?”

Of course, proponents of these bills claim they’re simply trying to enforce the laws against illegal immigration and that overturning longstanding precedent to deny American citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants is just a matter of law and common sense. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 into law earlier this spring and supports legislation against “anchor babies,” told a local Tucson television station“It is illegal to trespass into our country. It has always been illegal, and people have determined that they want to take that chance. They can take their children back with them.”

I admit it: I see the logic to that – striking at the children.

After all, the tough economic times have made the cheap, exploitable pool of labor undocumented immigrants provided so many in Arizona and elsewhere for so many years a burden. So, now that the incentive which led so many Americans to take advantage of the loose federal enforcement effort has evaporated, what better way to get rid of these “problem people” than to go after the children, all the while hiding behind patriotic bluster and “law-and-order” rhetoric and ethnic-group demonization.

So it was at the turn of the twentieth century when America’s WASP labeled the white immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe “inconceivable aliens” and fought fiercely to keep as many out as possible and impose a second-class status on those that made it through. Their children were not exempt.

So it was during World War II when the federal government deprived Japanese nationals and American citizens of Japanese descent of their liberty and interned them in concentration camps in the Western states, though they had done nothing wrong. Their children were not exempt from being uprooted and imprisoned.

So it was when Native Americans were quarantined on barren reservations throughout the West and when, after the Civil War, whites throughout the South and much of the North enacted law after law to maroon black Americans in a vast sea of cruelty. There, too, children as well as adults were the targets of oppression.

Indeed, there’s more than a little irony in the “anchor baby bill” advocates relying on the 14th Amendment’s declaration of the rights of the emancipated slaves. The reason: It would take blacks a century of determined struggle against implacable white resistance before their citizenship rights would become an uncontested reality in America.

So, the “anchor baby” bills have a notable “ancestry” in American history; the children of those deemed outside the bounds of citizenship have always been targets.

But that history also shows that the children of the oppressed have also always subsequently proven how equal they are in all the good qualities of humanity the bigots have declared them deficient in possessing. Their opportunity has been the nation’s salvation.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.

 

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  1. Montana June 16th, 2010 5:45 pm :

    The Tea Bag Party are just “haters not debaters” or as others have dubbed them “screamers not dreamers”, with their failed attempts at stopping Healthcare reform, they say they respect the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence but they do not mind passing laws, through weak Governors (no one voted for this crazy) who only cares about getting elected Governor, on the backs of undocumented workers, that will not pass Constitution muster.

    Brewer signed into law;

    1. S.B. 1070,
    2. No permit conceal weapons law,
    3. The famous Birthers law,
    4. Banning Ethic studies law,

    5. Could she be behind the Mural in Prescott, Arizona, ordered to be whiten,
    6. On deck to pass, no citizenship to babies born to undocumented workers,

    7. If she can read she should look up Arizona’s House Bill 2779 from two years ago (which was un-constitution and failed when legally challenged),
    8. The boycotted Martin Luther King Day, what idiots don’t want another holiday? Yes, you guessed it Arizona.

    Well Arizona, you can boycott new holidays and keep passing crazy laws and the rest of us will continue to challenged them in a court of law and continue to add cities to our Boycott of your state.

    As for the Tea Bag Party, their phony patriotism is sickening; they are just racists going by another name. We all know you are just itching to put a sheet on their head? Let’s face it the Republicans had eight years to deal with health care, immigration, energy (remember Cheney’s secret meetings with oil companies where loosening regulation and oversight were sealed), climate change and financial oversight and governance and they failed. It appears that the Republican Party is only good at starting wars (two in eight years, with fat contracts to friends of Cheney/Bush) but not at winning wars as seen by the continuing line of body bags that keep coming home. The Republicans party will continue turned inward to their old fashion obstructionist party (and their Confederacy appreciation roots) because they continue to allow a small portions (but very loud portion) of their party of “birthers, baggers and blowhards” to rule their party. I will admit that this fringe is very good at playing “Follow the Leader” by listening to their dullard leaders, Beck, Hedgecock, Hannity, O’Reilly, Rush, Savage, Sarah Bailin, Orly Taitz, Victoria Jackson, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the Blowhards and acting as ill programmed robots (they have already acted against doctors that perform abortions).

    The Birthers and the Tea Bag party crowd think they can scare, intimidate and force others to go along with them by comments like “This time we came unarmed”, let me tell you something not all ex-military join the fringe militia crazies who don’t pay taxes and run around with face paint in the parks playing commando, the majority are mature and understand that the world is more complicated and grey than the black and white that these simpleton make it out to be and that my friend is the point. The world is complicated and people like Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt believed that we should use government a little to increase social mobility, now it’s about dancing around the claim of government is the problem. The sainted Reagan passed the biggest tax increase in American history and as a result federal employment increased, but facts are lost when mired in mysticism and superstition. For a party that gave us Abraham Lincoln, it is tragic that the ranks are filled with too many empty suits and the crazy Birthers who have not learned that the way our courts work is that you get a competent lawyer, verifiable facts and present them to a judge, if the facts are real and not half baked internet lies, then, and only then, do you proceed to trial. The Birthers seem to be having a problem with their so called “Internet facts”. Let’s face it no one will take the Birthers seriously until they win a case, but until then, you will continue to appear dumb, crazy or racist, or maybe all three.

  2. Dogmeat June 22nd, 2010 12:26 pm :

    It is odd that there has been this big spike in right wing idiocy coming out of Arizona though. Texas has a higher background level of crazy and right now Arizona is like a supernova taking the attention. I wonder how long it will last.

    Actually it isn’t that strange. Arizona has been moving gradually towards the middle over the last twenty years. The population has doubled in that time and a big part of that spike wasn’t old retirees who tended to be conservative, but a lot of younger families moving from blue states, etc. In 2008 McCain only received 53.4% of the vote here in Arizona, his sixth lowest vote total among the states he won. Now think about that, his home state was one of his least supportive states. Had McCain been from Texas, Florida, etc., he likely would have lost Arizona.

    This state has a long history of very conservative, often racist politics and the supporters of those policies aren’t happy that they are consistently losing ground to moderates and liberals (simply termed as liberals in their tirades). Because of how the state legislature is set up conservatives still have a major majority in both houses but, when Napolitano was governor, she vetoed a lot of their stupidity. In fact she set the record for vetoes in the history of the state. You take her away, bring in Brewer who is a wing-nut’s wing-nut, and you see incredibly stupid legislation that was shut down by a reasonable governor make it out of the state house. At the same time you see an increase in non-conservative population as well as an increase in non-white population and the far white err, right is freaking out.