We already know the answer to that question, of course, but it’s not always polite to talk about it. As a special July 4th holiday post, I thought I’d talk a little immigration today, specifically folks who travel to the U.S. while pregnant for the purposes of obtaining U.S. citizenship for their little rugrats.

As I said before, this is not something one is supposed to discuss in the U.S. in polite company. It certainly is an issue, albeit an unimportant one in my opinion, but the people who are pushing for legal reform in this area are, by and large, racist whackos. Case in point:

The author of Arizona’s controversial new immigration law is considering a new proposal that would block the children of illegal immigrants from becoming citizens if they were born in the United States.

Critics of the bill that Republican state Sen. Russell Pearce is weighing say it would fly in the face of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which grants citizenship to anyone born in the U.S.

This is the guy who wrote the “Papers, Please” law in Arizona, so we already know he’s a fruitcake. Not only would the new law lead to a lot of racial profiling, but the passage of the law itself has led to a huge upheaval in the area of race relations. Nice job, Senator Pearce!

Arizona is not done yet, though. They’ve got a whole lot of legal reform on their plate, including a law dealing with teachers that have heavy foreign accents. Something tells me that Arizona is about to lose all of its math and science teachers. Not that it would make much of a difference, though.

Next up for Senator Pearce: mothers that travel to the U.S. to give birth. Yes, he’s now going after pregnant women and infants. As they say in the politics PR biz, those are some nice optics; I predict that Senator Pearce and the State of Arizona will soon be hiring Burson-Marsteller. And he certainly is adamant, isn’t he?

“This is an orchestrated effort by them to come here and have children to gain access to the great welfare state we’ve created,” Pearce said of Hispanic immigrants.

Hispanic groups hate this guy, as well as the rest of Arizona, and statements like that one don’t help at all. Accusing pregnant women of deliberately traveling to the U.S. to give birth is considered to be quite the inflammatory statement these days.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, though. Everyone knows this sort of thing happens all the time. We even have nifty terminology for the infant; they’re called “anchor babies,” which our friends at Wikipedia define as:

[A] term used by immigration reductionists in the United States to describe a child born in the U.S. to illegal aliens. It is generally used as a derogatory reference to the supposed role of the child, who as a U.S. citizen through the legal principle of jus soli, may facilitate immigration for relatives through family reunification.

This definition was obviously written by someone on the other side of the issue from Senator Pearce, although the substance here is accurate. Note that “immigration reductionists” are folks who want to reduce the number of immigrants coming into the U.S., and “family reunification” refers to the end game here: using the U.S. citizen baby as a legal platform to get the rest of its family (e.g. its daddy) into the U.S. as well. U.S. law has this strange predisposition towards keeping families together — imagine that.

I guess “anchor baby” is a derogatory term. The Chinese government doesn’t seem to like it either. Every time I type it into Google over here, I get the usual error message that usually means I have stumbled upon a forbidden keyword. Interesting.¹

Derogatory term or not, this kind of thing goes on all the time. And although no one in the U.S. would ever admit to going there to have a baby, over here in China the situation is different. China Daily ran a full-length feature on the subject yesterday:

Wang Rong, who is six-months pregnant, is about to leave Beijing for California so she can give birth to her baby in the United States and give the child its first gift – US citizenship.

The special delivery will cost Wang and her husband, both white-collar workers in the capital, 100,000 yuan ($15,000), but they say it is money well spent.

The expenditure will cover all costs, including services before departure, medical care in the US and a three-month stay there, thanks to the help of a Shanghai-based agency that specializes in taking mainland moms to North America.

“Given the quality of educational resources and employment prospects in China, where there is a huge population and harsh competition, I want my baby to win at the starting line by obtaining US citizenship,” she said.

Let me tell you, $15,000 for U.S. citizenship is a very small amount, perhaps even lower than annual tuition at one of China’s trendy international schools. Parents here will do whatever it takes for their child. And for those with lots of cash on hand, there are luxury options available as well. I would guess that a China-based agency doesn’t necessarily give its customers first class treatment, but there are others out there in the “birth tourism” industry that pull out all the stops:

Catering to the women is a nascent industry of travel agencies and hotel chains seeking to profit from the business.

The Marmara Manhattan, a Turkish-owned luxury hotel on New York’s City Upper East Side, markets birth tourism packages to expectant mothers abroad, luring more than a dozen pregnant guests and their families to the United States to give birth last year alone.

“What we offer is simply a one-bedroom suite accommodation for $7,750, plus taxes, for a month, with airport transfer, baby cradle and a gift set for the mother,” Marmara Hotel spokeswoman Alexandra Ballantine said.

The hotel estimates the total cost of the package at $45,000.

I think Senator Pearce would be shocked at the number of non-Hispanic parents around the world who are seriously interested in this. Given the fact that there are quite a few agencies out there in China and Hong Kong that facilitate these trips, I think the numbers are growing in this part of the world. Apparently this is part of an overall boom in the “industry”; according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the births in the U.S. to non-resident mothers jumped 53% from 2000 to 2006. That’s a pretty hefty rise, considering that U.S. immigration policy for the first few years after 9/11 was extremely tough and stingy with respect to tourist visas.

I suppose this should all be expected. I mean, why wouldn’t these parents be interested? The agencies talk a good game, and there are advantages:

The list of benefits runs long for babies born in the US, says Jiang Feng, the Chinese mainland partner of the agency, which originated in Taiwan.

Jiang said babies born in the US will, at the very least, be entitled to a place at an American public university, which is favored by many parents over domestic institutions, both for quality of teaching and cheaper tuition.

Well, I think Ms. Jiang is full of shit on that last part. In most places, you need to be a State resident for a certain amount of time before you can get a seat at a public university. But yes, certainly U.S. citizenship can be a good thing. Most of the people I know that have thought about this want to send their kids to the U.S. for public primary school. University is actually easier to deal with, as long as you have the money.

You know, I am somewhat sympathetic to the parents here. I’m not condoning the practice, but parents will do anything for their kids, and the lengths that Chinese parents will go to give their child “a leg up” on the competition (i.e. the rest of humanity) is astounding. If U.S. laws and regulations allow for this to happen, parents will exploit the loophole.

Folks in the “birth tourism” industry are another matter. Setting up an agency whose entire purpose is to facilitate fraud? That’s not cool.

Nevertheless, and with the spirit of July 4th in mind (whatever that means), I can’t get on board with racist clowns like Senator Pearce. Not only is his proposed legislation unconstitutional, which is a whole different topic, but the debate over immigration in the U.S. is too politically charged. There is absolutely no way that any State government, or the feds, would be able to address this issue in a calm and logical manner at the present time.

Since I don’t expect the U.S. government to address this “anchor baby” issue any time soon, all those agencies and parents here in China basically have the green light. Enjoy your citizenship, kids.
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1. On the VPN, an image search of “anchor baby” returns images of Glenn Beck and Hitler, which reinforces the whole “racist whackos” conclusion I stated above.[↩]

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