Anchor Baby Citizenship ‘Insanity’ Dominates on Campaign Trail

Immigration is the No. 1 topic on the Republican presidential candidates’ talking points. Within the broad immigration topic, the most explosive questions the candidates field are about birthright citizenship and anchor babies.

Plenty of fur is flying about whether birthright citizenship is constitutional, and whether the United States should continue the practice even though every industrialized nation except Canada long ago stopped conferring citizenship on illegal aliens’ children.

Activists oppose anchor babies, maternity hotels.

As an example of how foolish giving citizenship to children whose parents, sometimes by chance but much more often as a result of careful advance planning, are in the U.S. at the moment of birth, consider the case of 22-year-old Emma Coronel, drug multi-billionaire Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s wife.

In 2011, Guzman, who has the resources and the savvy, sent his pregnant wife to Lancaster, Calif., where she gave birth to twin, American citizen daughters. When the daughters turn 21, they can legally petition U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to bring their father, Guzman, to the U.S. to join them. Such a petition would be denied, but the point is that the mechanics in place, jus soli, leave the door wide open for extraordinary abuse.

A more common anchor baby exploitation is birth tourism, the increasingly popular practice of a foreign national coming to the U.S. allegedly as a tourist, but actually to give birth in a specially designed maternity hotel that caters to visa fraudsters. Chinese are the biggest abusers. The latest estimate is that as many as 60,000 Chinese births occurred in the U.S. in 2014, a six-fold increase over the 2012 total.

Rolling Stone recently provided an in-depth analysis of what goes on behind a maternity hotel’s closed doors. Titled Welcome to Maternity Hotel California, reporter Benjamin Carlson cited Peter Yang’s candid admission that if born in the U.S. his son will have access to “a good education,” while Yang will have access to “better business opportunities.” Since visa fraud is a felony punishable by imprisonment, fines or both, and a 10-year ban on reentering the U.S., vigorous ICE enforcement could close maternity hotels in short order if it weren’t for the White House’s pro-immigration bias.

Here’s a blast from the past about anchor baby citizenship which shows how widely unpopular it’s been long before this election cycle. Listen here to Senator Harry Reid’s 1993 proclamation that granting citizenship to illegal aliens’ children is something “no sane country” would do.

Yet during the more than two decades since Reid accurately described the U.S. anchor baby policy as insanity, Congress has failed to pass legislation that would require at least one parent to be a citizen or legal permanent resident before a child could be granted citizenship.