Most News Media Distorting Birthright Citizenship Issue And Advocating For Anchor Babies

By Roy Beck, Sunday, August 8, 2010, 4:44 PM EDT - posted on NumbersUSA

I'm just back from my annual week of leading teenagers in building homes for poor Americans. And I find that my former profession of journalism has gone a little wacky while I was gone, concerning reporting on the issue of birthright citizenship.

Most U.S. journalism is significantly unprofessional in covering immigration most of the time, but this last week has been among the worst I've seen.

How many times did reporters, editorial writers, columnists and anchors use phrases like "repealing the 14th amendment?"

Good grief! No opponent of birthright citizenship has talked about REPEALING the 14th amendment with all of its post-Civil War guarantees of civil rights.

But, of course, the open-borders biases of most journalists are pretty clear when they falsely seek to frame this issue as threatening the most important basis of civil rights for freed slaves and their descendants.

I'm catching up on my news reading from the week after arriving back from Appalachia (I started leading several dozen teenagers in these annual construction trips 21 years ago).

Hardly any journalists have given their readers even a hint that most of us opponents of birthright citizenship do not believe the 14th amendment even needs to be clarified. We believe Congress could pass a law requiring a baby to have at least one parent who is a citizen or legal immigrant before being given U.S. citizenship. We also believe it would be taken to court and the Supreme Court would ultimately decide.

The children born in the United States to illegal alien mothers are often referred to as "anchor babies." Under current practice, these children are U.S. citizens at birth, simply because they were born on U.S. soil. They are called anchor babies because, as U.S. citizens, they become eligible to sponsor for legal immigration most of their relatives, including their illegal alien mothers, when they turn 21 years of age, thus becoming the U.S. "anchor" for an extended immigrant family.

While there is no formal policy that forbids DHS from deporting the illegal alien parents of children born in the U.S., they rarely are actually deported. In some cases, immigration judges make exceptions for the parents on the basis of their U.S.-born children and grant the parents legal status. In many cases, though, immigration officials choose not to initiate removal proceedings against illegal aliens with U.S.-born children, so they simply remain here illegally.

Thus, the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens not only represent additional U.S. population growth, but act as 'anchors' to eventually pull a large number of extended family members into the country legally. In fact, an entire industry has built up around the U.S. system of birthright citizenship. Thousands of pregnant women who are about to deliver come to the United States each year from countries as far away as South Korea and as near as Mexico so that they can give birth on U.S. soil. Some come legally as temporary visitors; others enter illegally. Once the child is born, they get a U.S. birth certificate and passport for the child, and their future link to this country is established and irreversible

http://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusab ... dvocating-

ROY BECK is the CEO & Founder of NumbersUSA

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