Saturday, August 29, 2015

The term anchor baby has been tossed around by GOP candidates lately.  As usual, it started by Trump.  As usual, that helped Trump in the standings among GOP voters.  But when Jeb Bush used the term, it backfired on him.  His retraction to say the term applied to Asians only made things worse for him.  I am sure there are Asian groups who are offended by the term.  I don't look at it as an offensive term.  After all, anchor on a relay team is the best runner usually.  The anchor on a newscast is the highest paid.  So the anchor by itself is not bad.  The implication of term is, however, inaccurate.  It implies that the baby being born in the U.S. is an U.S. citizen and thus can protect the parents from deportation.  That, of course, is not true.  In case of Asians, the parents are not trying to avoid deportation.  They are usually wealthy Chinese who just want an outlet for their kids in case the communist country reverse its economic course.  It would also give the kid a better chance of obtaining an education in the U.S. if so desired in the future.

Chinese women giving tourism birth in the U.S.is nothing new.  It maybe illegal only in the sense that it circumvent tourist visa laws.  It has been overlooked in the past, particularly in California.  It is not an economic drain for the U.S. in that these women are paying Americans to house and feed them.  They spend money while in the U.S.  They and the baby then leave the country.  They are not picking up welfare checks.  Eventually the kid may come back for high school and college.  They may cost the education system money at that point but I am sure they would be paying to live here and the parents may even buy houses here.  So it hard to know what the full economic impact would be.  If the U.S. wants to stop this, it can do so by shutting down the so called birth hotels in California and other places popular to Chinese visitors.  No need to change the constitution regarding birth citizenship.  It is also not a problem worthy of a presidential debate!

We have a lot of problems in this country but pointing the finger at immigrants is unfair.  There are studies that say illegal immigrants are a drain to the economy and there are studies that say they are positive.  But as I always say, where there is a demand, there is a supply.  To clear up the question, just arrest the people who hire illegals.  There are only two reasons why a business must hire illegals:  they can't make a profit with American workers or there are not enough Americans willing to do the job.  If legal pressure cause the owners to change the practice then we will find out if either of these things are true.  If neither are true then businesses will thrive.  If either is true, then the businesses will fail without illegal immigrants.  In either case, illegal immigration will come to a halt and we will find out what the true economic impact of illegal immigrants are.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous9:35 AM

    Well, I think when a candidate gets desperate and wants to show how tough he/she is, they usually bring up China. So in this case, Jeb wanted to distance himself from the illegal immigrant debate (which focuses mainly on Latinos) and so he decided to bring Asians into the dialogue. It was just a blunder on his part because he can't say much since he has Latinos in his family. Now that Asians are now part of the discussion, people are looking into it, whereas it was never a big political debate (at least as far as I know).

    I don't have much to add here, since I am not familiar with birth hotels and women coming to the States to get pregnant. This is a strange concept to me and I'll have to take your word on it.

    -LBOAYM

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