California Taxpayer Protection Act on the ballot. If passed, the measure will prohibit a parent here illegally from applying for any state or local benefit for a U.S. born child. Sweeping in its implications, the act would halt non-emergency medical aid— including the taxpayer-funded pre-natal care that has actually been advertised across Mexico and other countries by migrant advocacy groups—and would stop state welfare payments that illegal immigrant parents collect on behalf of their citizen- children. This initiative would also eliminate the lure of birth tourism.
If passed, the initiative will go a long way to help balance the California budget and launch the long overdue national discussion of the actual meaning of the 14th Amendment. It would revitalize long neglected federal legislation on this subject of the kind proposed by Nathan Deal and many other members of Congress, none of which have ever been brought to the floor for a vote.
If the policy of granting birthright citizenship was once an affordable misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, it has long since become a massive entitlement that has collided with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 to create a perfect storm of mass immigration to our shores.
In 1965, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy pressed hard for the immigration legislation—it was the first bill he managed through to passage— that eliminated the so-called ‘national origin’ quotas that had been used to keep the flow of immigrants into the U.S. overwhelmingly European. Confronting critics of the bill who had the foresight to question whether it would result in torrential flows of peoples from impoverished lands that would strain America’s ability to assimilate them, Kennedy dismissed even the suggestion that the ethnic and cultural balance of the nation would be impacted and, in a portent of strategy employed by the proponents of mass immigration ever since, he accused the bills critics of bigotry.
“The charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational and with little foundation in fact,” Kennedy said about critics of the bill that raised the alarm it would result in a Third World stampede for American shores. “They are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage…”
The assessment that Kennedy was so utterly off the mark in his steadfast assurances that America’s cultural balance would not be dramatically tipped by the legislation is so undeniable that even unwavering liberals acknowledge it—and thank him for it. Just hours after his death, the Daily Kos website posted a homage to Kennedy by Dana Houle that celebrated his efforts to shepherd the 1965 immigration bill to passage.
“When he was arguing for the act,” Houle writes “Kennedy tried to assure critics that it wouldn’t significantly change the ethnic makeup of the country. Obviously he was wrong, and it is open to interpretation whether he misjudged the effects or concealed his intents.” Houle notes that in 1960, the foreign-born population of the U.S. was “only 5.4 percent.” Yet by 2000, that figure had jumped to more than 11 percent— a massive demographic shift fueled by an influx of immigrants of which, Houle gushed proudly “Only 16 percent were from Europe.” More than half were from Latin America.
With every passing day it is increasingly clear that the allure of birthright citizenship has picked up steam during the past four decades, becoming a runaway train, a human locomotive fueled by Latin America’s entrenched misery that has come barreling across the Rio Grande to demographically explode in major American population centers and—with human densities in urbanized regions reaching critical mass—fans out into the heartland.
The policy has created a self-sustaining dynamic on a fundamental level; encouraging immigrants to cross the border illegally and then rewarding them when they have a child here by making said baby an instant-citizen and therefore accorded all the rights and privileges afforded Americans; including welfare payments. Perhaps even more potent is their right, once they turn 18, to petition for their immigrant family members to stay in the United States. Thus these babies are far more than euphemistic anchors: they are quite literally paychecks and a membership card into the network of social services offered in America. This powerful dynamic is now pervasive across the nation, resulting in chaotic scenes as American citizens demand enforcement of immigrations laws while immigrants and their advocacy networks decry any effort to deport those here illegally.
In Georgia, the children of illegal immigrants that have been deported are put on stage in front of 3,000 Latinos who fill a church, gathered to listen to heart-rending stories of how their families have been “torn apart” by the enforcement of America’s immigration laws. One 12-year-old girl recounts how her mother was deported back to Honduras but chose to leave her five children, including a chronically ill 2-year-old, in the care of their 16-year-old aunt, who had to drop out of school to care for them.
In Texas, a network television news crew is at the bedside of an illegal immigrant from Mexico who just underwent a C-section delivery of her most recent child. It’s a surgical delivery that will cost taxpayers close to $5,000 in Medicaid payments—much more if complications for either mother or child develop. The woman illegally crossed the border only a few months earlier, very pregnant, along with her husband and two other children for the express purpose of having the baby in America. “I am very glad he was born,” the mother tells the crew through a translator. “That is why I came here; so my children, my husband and I could have a better life.” In some hospitals along the Texas-Mexico border, births to illegal immigrants now account for half—or more—of all babies delivered.
In California, Saul Arellano, the small son of Elvira Arellano, appears at rallies promoting mass amnesty for illegal immigrants and reunification for parents that have been deported with their families in America. Saul’s mother was deported (a second time) back to Mexico in the summer of 2007 after she was arrested and convicted of Social Security fraud. Following her conviction she ignored a deportation order, declared she had “a right of sanctuary” and quickly became a cause célèbre among Latino and immigration activists. During her second deportation, Arellano left Saul, who was born in Oregon in 1999 shortly after she was first caught and deported back to Mexico, in the United States to serve as something of a child surrogate for her cause. Just weeks after his mother was deported, immigration activists took Saul to Washington D.C. where he was marched through the halls of Congress with other children of illegal immigrants holding a banner that read “Born in the U.S.A, don’t take our moms and dads away.”
Whether they are newborn or teenagers, children born to illegal immigrants in the U.S. are such a rapidly growing population they are driving the sweeping shift of ethnic demographics that is literally changing the face and culture of America. The specific number of children born to illegal immigrants each year is difficult to project given the reluctance or inability of the government to accurately account for the size of the illegal immigrant population (estimates range from a low of 12 million to a high 38 million men, women and children) and the mercurial subsistence existence of illegal immigrants themselves. Their numbers are difficult to track given actual apprehensions balanced with those elude detection and use of multiple identities and forged documents. But even conservative estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center put the number at a staggering 300,000 children born to illegal immigrants here annually. Other estimates have the number of children born to illegal immigrants at more than a million annually.
The impact of millions of illegal immigrants having children here has landed the hardest across the American southwest; in California, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico, all states that saw dramatic increases in illegal immigration following the 1986 amnesty that effectively rang like a cattle bell across Latin America. In the two decades that followed the passage of the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which legalized 3 million illegal immigrants (though the government initially projected that 900,000 people would apply for the amnesty), more immigrants entered the country illegally than at any other time in the nation’s history. Far from stemming the tide of illegal immigration—which was how the bill’s amnesty provisions were sold to the American people—its enforcement provisions were never carried out and the result was a sustained land rush in anticipation that, sooner or later, another mass amnesty would be granted. The impact in the southwest was overwhelming; with public schools and hospitals bearing the sustained brunt of a Biblical-scale exodus that poured forth from the impoverished barrios and emptied many small towns across Mexico, which has provided the vast majority of the economic refugees fleeing northward. A profound result of this— though faithfully ignored by those who favor mass immigration—has been industries that had long-supplied multi-ethnic, working class American communities with critical jobs such as valets, janitorial services, busboys, landscaping and construction work rapidly became the near exclusive domain of Spanish-speaking workers.
Run, Squat and Drop
While proponents of immigration and advocates of illegal immigrants are quick to dismiss the “anchor baby” phenomena as a boogie man conjured forth by right-wing ideologues; in reality the practice is well documented in classic Chicano literature—hardly a bellwether of conservative thought. Luis Rodriguez, the noted author and poet that published his seminal work in 1993, Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA, that chronicled his life growing up in East L.A. and joining a gang and then quitting
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