Loaded term ‘anchor baby’ conceals complex issues

Donald Trump proudly throws it around. Jeb Bush stumbled over it. And Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats have decried it.

The loaded term “anchor babies” has become a lightning rod of the 2016 presidential campaign.

It is used as a pejorative, often meant to conjure images of women crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to give birth to children who are U.S. citizens and would shield them from deportation (though the parents of such children have been frequently deported). Bush gave the term another twist last week when he defended its use, then said, “Frankly, it’s more related to Asian people.”

The impulses driving immigrants to have children in the United States vary widely, as do the economic circumstances of those who drop “anchors.”

While some have children in the U.S. to gain economic advantages, Southern California has seen a boom in so-called maternity tourism, often involving well-to-do pregnant women from Asia who are in the United States legally.

Last year, federal agents targeted three Southern California businesses that helped pregnant Chinese women travel to the U.S., usually on tourist visas, so their children could be born U.S. citizens.

The heated debate comes at a time when some mainstream Republicans have urged the party to court Latino and Asian voters.

But Trump has shifted the dialogue on immigration by, among other things, coming out against birthright citizenship. He has forced more moderate candidates such as Bush to tack to the right, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Ramakrishnan called Bush’s comments on Asians “both clumsy and offensive.”

Asians “were largely ignored before, and now they’ve been thrust into the limelight in a very divisive way,” he said Wednesday.

In the San Gabriel Valley and some other parts of Southern California, birthing hotels are an open secret.

Because it is not in and of itself illegal for a foreign national to give birth in the United States, birth tourism businesses for years have openly announced their services.

A website called ChineseInLA.com has more than 100 listings for maternity hotels in Arcadia, Irvine, Rowland Heights, Monterey Park and other cities, with names such as USLoveBaby and Star Baby Care Center. In Arcadia, the phenomenon became so well known that the sight of an unfamiliar pregnant Asian woman has led some to call police.

“A lot of times, someone will see a pregnant woman of Asian descent walking around who they don’t know and think, hey, she’s here illegally, and call us about it,” Arcadia police Lt. Roy Nakamura said. “Sometimes it just ends up being a relative of a resident that resides here, and the home hasn’t been modified into a business.”

In 2013, the Arcadia Police Department assigned a full-time detective to handle complaints about birth tourism and other quality-of-life issues, Nakamura said.

Authorities investigate each complaint for violations of building codes and city ordinances, but say they have identified only one illegal birthing center.

Since 2013, complaints about birthing hotels have declined dramatically, he added.

As the practice has become better known and immigration officials more focused on it, pregnant women have been denied visas or refused entry into the U.S. That, in turn, appears to have pushed some businesses to attempt new ways to outsmart the system.

In search warrant affidavits filed earlier this year targeting three birth tourism businesses catering to Chinese women, agents wrote that would-be mothers were coached to lie on visa applications about the purpose and length of their stay. Businesses also allegedly helped alter or fabricate college diplomas and other documents about their employment and income level back home.

Charges have not been filed against the operators of the three Southern California businesses.

Greg Z. Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the political debate was incorrectly portraying the birth tourism problem as a gaping loophole in immigration law.

“It’s a very small, fraudulent practice that immigration enforcement is already attuned to, and putting a lot of resources into combating,” he said.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors restrictive immigration policies, said the term “anchor baby” traditionally applies to the American-born offspring of families who have settled in the U.S., and not to birth tourists.

Although birth tourism is not as widespread as illegal immigration, Krikorian said he is more disturbed by the practice because it grants citizenship to people who have no ties to the U.S.

Although birth tourism may be a small phenomenon, many U.S. citizen children have been born to parents in the country without legal status.

In 2012, the Pew Research Center estimated that 4 million immigrant parents in the country without authorization lived with their U.S.-born children.

Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine, said the notion that parents have children in the U.S. to protect themselves from deportation is a departure from reality, pointing out that children who are U.S. citizens have to wait until they are 21 before starting the process of sponsoring a parent who is in the country without legal status.

“It would take an amazingly tactical or Machiavellian parent to somehow think that the child’s status protects the parents,” he said.

“They are not thinking 25 years in the future.”

Zenen Jaimes, 24, was born in Chicago to Mexican parents who came to the U.S. illegally in the 1990s after jobs dried up during an economic crisis in Mexico.

Having children to protect themselves from deportation, he said, “never even crossed their minds.”

“Once they got here they just went through the normal process of starting a family,” he said.

His mother was able to gain legal residency after his older brother – who was also born in the U.S. – sponsored her. But his legal status didn’t protect his father from deportation a few years ago.

“That’s the case for thousands of kids who grew up like me,” said Jaimes, who is now a policy analyst for United We Dream, which advocates for the rights of young immigrants.