Anchor babies aweigh: the truth about birth tourism and "chain migration".

AuthorDalmia, Shikha

IN THIS REPUBLICAN presidential cycle, Donald Trump is supposed to be immigrants' archenemy and Jeb Bush their archangel. Trump wants to deport U.S. citizens; Bush co-wrote a book three years ago extolling the virtues of immigration reform.

But both men have been peddling popular myths about "anchor babies," the pejorative term given to children born in the United States to undocumented parents. Trump does this because he is digging deep into the nativist fever swamps, Bush because he apparently doesn't fully understand the subject of his own book.

After the 2012 election, when Trump was chastising Mitt Romney for his "crazy" and "mean-spirited" plans to encourage illegal immigrants to "selfdeport," Bush and the Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick co-wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal raising the alarm over "chain migration," which makes use of "family reunification" visas. "This chain migration," they wrote, is not only the "driver of immigration policy," but it "does not promote the nation's economic interests."

Bush's comments were no doubt meant to earn him street cred among conservatives otherwise cool to his ideas for increasing economic immigration. But the fact is that he was regurgitating a myth cooked up by ultra-restrictionist organizations such as Numbers USA. That group defines "chain migration" as an "endless and often-snowballing" process in which "chains of foreign nationals...immigrate because the law allows citizens and lawful permanent residents to bring in their extended, non-nuclear family members." These family members bring in still more people until--voila!--entire villages are emptied into the United States, as through a chain reaction.

That is not how America's immigration system actually works.

For starters, there is no provision in U.S. immigration law for either permanent residents (green-card holders) or American citizens to sponsor nonnuclear relatives such as aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, grandparents, or cousins to come to the United States. Other than spouses, parents, and minor children, the only relatives who can be sponsored are adult children and siblings. And depending upon the green card backlogs for their country, this process could take them anywhere from 15 to 25 years.

This means that if a typical 26-year-old foreign woman were to get married to an American citizen, and then sponsor her 25-year-old sister to get a green card, that sister would be 40 years old before she...

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