The student news site of Seward County Community College

Crusader News

The student news site of Seward County Community College

Crusader News

The student news site of Seward County Community College

Crusader News

Misconception of ‘anchor babies’ induces tantrums

It’s been frowned upon when immigrants from any country think they have a privilege to not only cross the border, but to give birth to their baby on U.S. soil. Coming from my very own perspective, and being an immigrant myself, I can understand that to a certain degree, but that doesn’t mean I will lean towards either side of this fence. My intentions are to simply inform and educate readers to come to a better understanding of the process that immigrants have to go through in order to receive some sort of legal status through their U.S. born child. Also to provide an insight, and an open-minded suggestion to so much more than what’s being shown on the surface to most Americans. I see it from both points of view and that is exactly what I want to give out to the readers. To start with, automatic citizenship is not given to the illegal parents of the child. The child is given automatic citizenship due to the 14th Amendment, but the parents have to wait until the child is of age, 18, to begin the application process. Even then, the 18-year-old child has to obtain proof that they are of qualification to apply. According to Al King from the Denver Post, “It’s estimated there may be as many as 200,000 anchor babies born each year in the U.S.” Frenzy breaks out in our society, but I think we give too much credit to undocumented immigrants, even on things they don’t do. I believe that even legal residents get reeled into the acts of what undocumented immigrants do. I was born in Mexico, but my two younger siblings were born here while we were in our process of “getting fixed” and the only thing that my mother, a legal resident, benefits from is from the medical aspect, which is a big chunk of it all, but not once in my 19 years of life has she fought to gain more that wasn’t already given to her freely. A lot of this controversy is from second hand sources, and not the hard facts that need to be sought out by doing a fair share of research. Let’s not just scratch the surface with information and create a whole view on immigrants based off of it. And that’s another thing, it’s not on the child, it’s on the parents. The children can have no fault of what parents decide for infants. All these tantrums that are arising because of the infants being anchor babies has been blown out of proportion, because of their parents’ ambitions to want to gain rights on this land more than what is given away to them. I do believe that many legal immigrants are associated with the bad apple that ruined it for everyone else. That’s a big misconception, that anchor babies automatically give thier illegal parents citizenship, which is not true.

daniel and caleb

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Misconception of ‘anchor babies’ induces tantrums