Lindsey Graham: Hatin' The Constitution. 14th StyleFollow

FTFY

I assume his point is that one or both parents should be native-born or naturalized citizens for a baby to be considered an automatic citizen.

That's going to leave all sorts of interesting loopholes around legitimacy (if the father is a citizen but the mother is not, for example).

I'd like to see a cost analysis of the so-called anchor babies. How many are there? Do their parents cost us more than they contribute?

An amendment isn't going to pass anyway so I can't get too riled up. At least Graham is approaching the matter constitutionally rather than the boneheads in Arizona who wanted to pass that "No birth certificate for immigrant children" law.

Somewhat echoing Samira, I'd be interested in real numbers of how many immigration cases are actually impacted by this. Not estimates of how many "anchor babies" may exist but how many actual immigration cases in 2009 ended with the parents remaining in the US due to their child's citizen status. I suspect (without any evidence) that this is a something of a non-issue in the greater sphere of the impact of illegal immigration.

At the risk of sounding like a xenophobic prick, I see Graham's point. On a basic level, it makes a certain sense that only those born from citizens should receive automatic citizenship (or born from one citizen, although it would be much harder to verify this in the case that the father is the citizen and the mother isn't).

Look at it the other way: if you and your pregnant wife are vacationing in France, and she goes into labor prematurely and gives birth in a French hospital, is (or should) the baby be an automatic French citizen, entitled to all rights conferred with that status? And that's just an accidental birth. According to Graham, people are coming to this country specifically to give birth here and attain citizenship for the baby.

Also, this made me think of Starship Troopers for some reason.

Not ONE of our sacred Founding Fathers was born to citizen parents. I believe that makes the Constitution unconstitutional.

David Vitter recently stated that in his opinion the President should be required to have two native-born parents. We wouldn't have had a legitimate President before Buchanan had that requirement been in place.*



*No, I didn't look it up. Go for it.

Edit: ugghh, was/were. Let me go home already.

Edited, Jul 29th 2010 2:25pm by Samira

OTST.


From that article:

Well. I'll provide the same link I provided the last time you asked this (which you've apparently forgotten about in the meantime).



That's the costs just in Los Angeles. $48 Million, or 24% of the total welfare and foodstamp bill goes to pay for anchor babies. That's for one month. It's not a minor problem.

Edited, Jul 29th 2010 3:00pm by gbaji

That failed to answer the question asked. But they are scary numbers.

Edited, Jul 29th 2010 7:15pm by Uglysasquatch

It is unknown whether the net cost to government outweighs the income of illegal immigrants, according to a 1995 RAND study - not exactly a bastion of liberal thought.

http://immigrationfacts.info/The_Costs_of_Immigration_to_Taxpayers.pdf

The benefit to businesses is vast, of course.

The website gbaji cited has this to say on it's page on illegal immigration:

"Today, between eight and fourteen million illegal aliens reside in the United States, draining our nation’s economy, while presenting a security threat to the people of the United States. Public officials have not only repeatedly failed to protect our borders from this illegal alien invasion, but they have also been complicit in the effort to undermine our nation's immigration laws."

http://www.judicialwatch.org/immigration-problems

Hardly an impartial source of information.

Er?



24% of the total allotment of welfare and food stamp benefits in the most populous county in the United States is being spent on precisely the group you were asking about.



What do you mean by "affected" though? The last time we had this discussion you argued that they don't create a weight or cost on the rest of us because they're either placed with a legal relative (with the parents being deported) or the whole family is deported, with the child having the right to return to the US as a citizen at age 18. I presented this link to show that there is a cost, and it's massive. So regardless of what's happening, we're bearing the cost of it.

Maybe you're just focusing on an irrelevant portion of the issue?



You keep asking about what percentage of cases of anchor babies result in their parents being allowed to continue living in the US illegally. You insist this doesn't happen in large numbers, but aside from speculation, you provide no evidence for this. Instead, you insist that if I must provide statistics about the number of illegals who do stay in the country because of having an anchor baby.

Yes. Cause public workers are going to report accurately how often they *don't* report someone as an illegal because they don't want them to be separated from their child. That's going to work out well...



Your edit must have come between when I loaded the page and hit reply. Funny...

You're correct. It doesn't directly answer the question you asked. I just happen to think that your question is semi-irrelevant. Clearly, this is a huge cost to us, whether the parents are allowed to ride in on the babies or not. I happen to believe (admittedly via mostly anecdotal evidence) that this is the norm. But hey! I only live in an area with a massive undocumented immigrant population, so it's not like I might have a better sense for this than some guy from Chicago, right?

Edited, Jul 29th 2010 5:05pm by gbaji

No, I really don't. Feel free to find the thread(s) proving me wrong and I'll be happy to admit to being wrong but if I've asked this more than once prior to this thread, I'd be shocked. Maybe you're confusing me with someone else. I wasn't even demanding anything from you, I was just broadly asking about the actual impact of anchor babies on actual immigration deportation cases/hearings and kind of wanted data regarding that rather than you babbling on about the cost of food stamps. Are you feeling unusually threatened or something today? You're awfully defensive, even for you.

I'm sure you think your anecdotal "evidence" is just ducky but you'll have to excuse me if I take the Word of Gbaji with a bit of skepticism and prefer some real data.

It has a 100% impact on the deportation of the children themselves. How is that (and the cost we pay for it), not relevant?

The effect on deportation of the parents is in addition to that.



Joph. There is simply no way other than anecdotal evidence to discuss the number of people who *don't* ever get reported to ICE because the social worker handling their case doesn't want the parents of a child to be deported. How do you collect that? It's impossible. But the sheer volume of cases of "illegal who's been arrested 18 times and still hasn't been deported for some reason" should clue us in that "otherwise law abiding mother of an anchor baby child" is going to be far down on the list of people likely to be quickly deported from the US.

There are 12 million or so illegal immigrants in this country. How many get deported each year? There's your starting point Joph. Do some math and start figuring out the odds that the parents of an anchor baby are going to be deported in 10 years, or 20, or ever...

And just to provide one more data point (this time directly relevant to your question), I found The Hake Hardship Scale. It's an interesting paper, written by a lawyer who defends deportees. He has an 88% success rate, and came up with a scale to define what factors historically lead to success when applying for a stay of deportation.

It's a really long paper, but about halfway down you'll find the actual numbers. His scale requires 11 points to have a probable win. He grants 5 points to having a US citizen child or spouse (10 if you have both!), with an additional point for each extra child. The only other criteria which exceeds that valuation is medical hardship which is worth from 1 to 6 points (so could be less, but could be worth one more). The point being that the odds of being able to avoid deportation nearly double if you have a US child.


Again, this doesn't provide the direct numbers on deportation you wanted, but if you read the early parts of the paper, you'll find that these numbers aren't released. No one knows them. Not even the people who work in the field. They're apparently not even available via FOIA requests. So it's somewhat meaningless for us to demand hard numbers to prove this point. It is absolutely fair to say that the existence of an anchor baby does make it less likely for someone to be deported.


Remember, this is also only looking at situations where one has been "caught" and ICE has chosen to pursue with a deportation. We can only speculate about the number of people who are simply not reported to ICE in the first place, but I don't think it's hard to imagine that the impact on a US child might play into that decision. It's not like people in the education and social services professions don't know pretty well which children have illegal immigrant parents. Do you think they rush out to report this? In an environment where we have dozens of "sanctuary cities" where official policy is to not report immigration violations, is anyone seriously suggesting that this isn't being done "unofficially" on a much larger scale?