This is actually the first of a couple posts. I’d rather start with the second, but experience tells me that if I try, we’ll end up talking about this aspect anyway: Birthright citizenship and “anchor babies.”
First, a bit of background. Historically, my views on immigration (legal or otherwise) have generally been pretty liberal. I stopped short of supporting amnesty, but I consider most of the freak-out to be unseemly. I’ve lived in immigrant enclaves where I would have been surprised of all of my neighbors had all of their paperwork in order. My wife has worked at a hospital that spent most of its time speaking Spanish rather than English. My impression has always matched the left far more than the right. That started to change a little bit about the time the recession hit. I started gearing up support for doing something about it (mostly on the employment side), but then illegal immigration rates fell and it became a non-issue for me again.
I do pretty strongly support birthright citizenship, however. I believe the anchor baby* phenomenon is overwrought at most. I more fear generations of non-citizens than I do a lucky sprite or two getting citizenship by geography. We could mitigate the generational aspect by giving them citizenship when they get older so that their kids are citizens and so on, but I don’t really have that kind of faith in our bureaucracy. In general, if they’re here it is better that they be documented than not. I am not willing to go so far as to give everyone here legal residency, but am willing to at least give it to their children. We need the normalizing factor. Especially if we ever want them to assimilate (which I do).
Beyond that, there is rather little indication that anchor babies are a problem on a grander scale. It’s questionable whether they exist to begin with. The popular image of what birthright citizenship means and the rights it grants is off-base, regardless. Even if they do exist, however, and we find the rights that we extend unacceptable, it doesn’t seem remotely severe enough to warrant an overhaul of how we appraise citizenship.
A couple personal angles: I do know someone that had what I will call a “citizenship baby.” Which is like an anchor baby, but not really. They had mapped out wanting kids five years apart. Instead, they found themselves in the US. They decided to have the second kid early. That would give the second kid dual citizenship, which was worth altering plans for. There was no “anchor” aspect to it since they were here legally and fully planned to return to Japan (and were looking forward to it!). In one sense, this seems like it could be an abuse of the system, but in a different context than is often mentioned.
The second thing is that there is a mythology surrounding people that hop the border and the first thing they do is sign up for Medicaid and take advantage of our lavish government benefits (no, that is not meant without irony). My wife’s experience at the immigrant hospital suggests pretty strongly that this is not the case. Broadly speaking, they were more nervous than anything. It didn’t matter how many times they were assured that the hospital would not turn them into ICE, they would come in, have the baby, and leave AMA with startling frequency. While generally a much better behaved group health-wise than most of the poor that Clancy dealt with in charity hospitals, they were also notoriously bad about prenatal visits – largely for the same reasons.
Which is not to say that they aren’t taking advantage of government programs. But it just never squares with the popular conception by those who are extremely concerned about the number of immigrants we have crossing the border illegally.
I should add that, despite the above, I am actually somewhat sympathetic to arguments that our immigration policy is too geared towards families (allowing family members to sponsor family members and such) and not enough geared towards economic need. To address this, though, we’d need to get serious about immigration policy. Otherwise, with some exceptions (the DREAM Act being one), the status quo will continue to rule the day.
* – If you object to my usage of this term, wait for the second post where I will address argumentation and terminology.
I don’t have a worked-out position on immigration policy, but I’ve long held that it’s a situation in which rights as well as duties come into conflict and the prudent way forward isn’t always easily seen. The State has a responsibility for the good of its citizens, but, at the same time, we’re all human beings, documented or not, “legal” or not, with rights that arise from our being human.
I agree as to the central conflict.
My wife’s experience at the immigrant hospital suggests pretty strongly that this is not the case. Broadly speaking, they were more nervous than anything. It didn’t matter how many times they were assured that the hospital would not turn them into ICE, they would come in, have the baby, and leave AMA with startling frequency. While generally a much better behaved group health-wise than most of the poor that Clancy dealt with in charity hospitals, they were also notoriously bad about prenatal visits – largely for the same reasons.
This doesn’t surprise me, but I still find it morally troubling. Prenatal visits can be vital to the health of both mother and child. Our current policy would not seem to be pro-life.
Well, it’s not so much our current policy as it is what they perceive our policy to be. Our policy is that they won’t be turned over to ICE. They fear that they will be and act accordingly.
Their more legitimate fear can be the CPS, which will get called under certain circumstances (positive drug screen, for example). Now, the CPS itself shouldn’t care about immigration status (at least as far as I know). But that’s probably enough to scare them off. This is a more complicated issue because it involves more than just immigrants.
I’ve often wondered about undocumented people who work under fake social security numbers. Do they get taxes taken out that they then cannot claim refunds on? If so, then it seems that these particular laborers actually contribute more than they take, or at least arguably some of them do.
Certainly some of them do, if they’re on official payrolls. Particularly if their family is back home and/or they are reticent about seeking medical care.
There is no privacy interest in a social security number for someone who is dead and the card is ridiculously easy to forge with a color laser printer. Verification of a number usually involves seeing if the name and the number match in the government’s database. With that in mind, what’s surprising is the low number of numbers in actual use. Over the course of my career, I have taken depositions of three different guys purportedly named “Jose Cantu.”I can’t recall if they were using the same number, but one of them was quite forthright that he came illegally, bought his fake identity from a vendor near MacArthur Park, and worked illegally for a while until he could get his own paperwork squared away.
In that case, I wonder what that means for the taxes that are withheld and whether they can (or if they can, whether in practice they feel comfortable enough to) claim the refunds.
Taxes are withheld from the earnings, but no one claims credit for them, because the real Jose Cantu is dead, which would be spotted were a return to be filed for him.
That’s what I suspected, which would suggest that those who are on official payrolls contribute more and probably receive less than they are entitled to, not to mention the fact that many of them rent (and some buy) property, which involves paying indirect (and some direct) property taxes, and of course, they pay sales taxes.
Quite true. Illegal immigrants are generally a positive to the tax base, as they pay taxes but don’t claim many benefits. Certainly not the payroll tax ones (Medicare/SS).
I imagine they would claim enough exemptions to avoid having any more than the bare minimum withheld.
You DO realize FICA alone is a 7% bite from a paycheck, and you can’t withhold from it? Much less claim Medicare or SS benefits with a forged SSN.
In the end, immigrants who are paid in anything other than cash under the table have no choice but to pay far more in taxes than they can possibly get in benefits.
Even the cash under the table types undoubtably do, since they’ll ultimately pay sales and property taxes (if through rent) and cannot claim much of the benefits of citizenship.
That’s such a transparent alias. Just throw him the ball/ If he can catch it, he’ s not Jose Cantu.
I’m an open borders guy. But in practice that doesn’t work because most people aren’t and some of them tend to react really badly to large-scale influxes of immigrants. So in practice I promote a policy that makes noises about controlling immigration, but actually only manages to keep it at a level just below where violent reaction results. That’s about where we are now, although I would ideally tweak the system to make it a little more fair and less likely to persuade people to trek through a) desert and b) private property to get here.
Anchor babies? I don’t believe in them, either, but the more the merrier I say.
I am pretty far from an open borders guy. But I think I am still to the left of center in large part because of all of the ways I am not worried.
I figure the threat of anchor babies, if they were to exist, is mitigated by the fact that, you know what, they’re born here. They have a head start on the assimilation process. We need more assimilated Americans.
I am pretty far from an open borders guy.
So much for my hive mind theory.
you know what, they’re born here.
Just like I was. I’m not sure what I did to deserve citizenship more than them.
Open borders guy here. People are a positive good. If we have people who bust their asses to get here, they’re people with the American Gene already. If they want to have their children here so their kids can have a better life? They’re the type of parents who will bust their children’s asses in school to make sure those kids do well… the way my ancestors did.
The bad immigrants? The lazy ones who we don’t want? They’re not getting up and coming here.
I’m pretty much a convert to the open borders guy, or as-open-as-possible.
But immigration does come at a cost, even if it’s not a net cost. I’m not referring particularly to the “cost” of having non-European cultures in the U.S., although the mixing of cultures might in some cases create tensions. I am referring, rather, to the “cost” that comes from increased immigration creating competition for jobs in the short term. As Will notes above, in a recession, immigration tends to decline, but there is still short-term competition, and I think any pro-open borders argument ought to at least acknowledge that concern.
I say this because too often, pro-open borders people simply rely on the tropes of “opposition to immigration is thinly disguised racism” and “immigrants just do the jobs Americans don’t want to do.” One reason these tropes have such currency is because there’s a lot of truth to them, and even the ostensibly non-racist arguments against immigration and sincere concern about jobs competition often mask an underlying bigotry or refusal to acknowledge the many cultural and economic contributions immigrants make. But at the same time, these tropes bulldoze over objections that are sincerely offered and even if based on false premises, have a certain non-bigoted logic of their own.
Wow, I just got on a soapbox that had only marginal relevance to the post. Sorry.
You actually touch on what I will be getting into on my follow-up. I find the immigration debate itself pretty depressing (so much so that the subject was banned on Hit Coffee until earlier this year – the only subject I have ever said is entirely off-limits).
I do worry about cultural coherence and I think that there is an upper-bound to how many new people we can have before we start to lose that. Whether that number is above or below the number that would come if we had open borders I don’t know, but I would not want it to be left to chance. I do think we can bring in more than we are bringing in now without having to worry about cultural coherence. I’d still have some economic concerns, and I worry about the number of people we have coming from one place that we share a border with. There’s really no way around saying that.
I was probably too dismissive of concerns about cultural coherence. I admit that at least in the abstract, cultural incoherence (the opposite of cultural coherence?) can be an important concern. However, I do tend to be mostly unconcerned about it.
On the economic front, I even buy the argument that in the long run, things will probably get better with any conceivable influx of people. I do, however, suppose there might be a saturation point, and then people might need need a right to exit (which people in the US already have) and a right of entry or access to other places (which depends on the policy of the prospective host country/countries).
I am mostly unconcerned myself, though I was reaching a point of concern before the border-crossing ebbed.
I *mostly* think you are right on the economic front. I don’t think short-term concerns are wholly illegitimate (and I’m not saying you do), but I do think we have to cognizant of the fact that it’s easy for those of us whose jobs and livelihoods are never threatened by people sneaking or being smuggled across the border to overlook that there is some real-life impact here and this has consequences.
My main concern for the long term is work force balance. If we’re moving more and more towards a “knowledge economy” where the bulk of the economic heavy lifting is going to be done by thinky-worky, then our immigration policy needs to be reflected in that insofar as who we bring in. We have one education level where unemployment isn’t great but isn’t dreadful, and we have another education level where we are having a devil of a time trying to figure out how they are going to contribute going forward. We need more of the former, while the latter could ultimately have detrimental effect. (I am skeptical of sending everyone to college, though for some this is the answer.)
Will,
Thanks for your answer. I can’t wait to read your next post on immigration.
They have a head start on the assimilation process. We need more assimilated Americans.
Actually, my understanding is that for the most part first-generation Hispanic immigrants—legal or otherwise—are fine, upstanding (non-)citizens, and that it goes downhill from there—that the rates of criminality are considerably higher among the more-assimilated second and third generations.
“Importing the superior culture, then corrupting them,” as an old college professor used to say. Yeah, a lot of the statistics on second and third generation are less than inspiring. But… a part of the assimilation process. Assimilating disproportionately into the lower economic classes of American culture, unfortunately.
“…although I would ideally tweak the system to make it a little more fair and less likely to persuade people to trek through a) desert and b) private property to get here.”
I was just thinking about this during my recent trip to Mexico. Going into Mexico, we weren’t really bothered much about the point of our stay. They asked us where we were going and for how long, questions they had already asked us on the paper form, and I assume this was done to weed out anyone with an inconsistent story. After that, we were free to go. Now, we obviously weren’t legal citizens or anything, but there seemed to be nothing that stopped us from extending our stay at the hotel an extra week or disappearing into the countryside never to be seen again.
Does it work the same way on the inverse? My only experience coming into America is as a citizen, so I don’t know how that works for foreigners. But if a Mexican national arrives at a border crossing, passport in hand, and says he is heading up to San Diego for the day to catch a Padres game, will they stop him? Will he need other documentation? Are passports hard to come by in Mexico? I just wonder why folks are crossing desserts/private property/fences/rivers. What is it that I don’t understand about foreign visitors, particularly from Latin America, coming to the states that makes it necessary for them to LITERALLY sneak across the border?
I have heard that some countries require a visa* for visitors; maybe the US requires visas of visitors from Mexico and select Latin American countries. (I don’t know.)
Also, I have heard that a sizable number of people (I heard about 40%) from Mexico in the US illegally came here on visas and simply overstayed them. I have no idea if any of this is true or if the 40% figure is even close to being true.. But that’s what I’ve heard.
*It’s at this point that I’m tempted to make some unfunny joke about how it really is a visa, and not a mastercard, they require. But I won’t do it! I swear, I won’t do it!!!
I believe that all we need to go to Mexico is a passport, but to come here they need a travel visa (apparently 30-something countries are exempt from this, I’d be surprised if Mexico were one of them). I don’t know how difficult it is to get a visa, but it can’t be too easy if they’re willing to scrape across the desert.
That makes sense. It’d be interesting to see what the official rational for such distinctions are. While it might be accurate and reasonable to enact them if there is a greater tendency for folks from a given nation to abuse visas, it is always squishy to have laws or policies that begin with involve the phrase “… THOSE people …”
I suspect that the rationale is more-or-less what you think it is. It might be weighted in evidence or speculation, but I am relatively certain that given its druthers, we would let our border with Mexico be traversed unimpeded. It causes a lot of headaches for everybody.
Full list here. Brunei’s a bit of a surprise, as is the absence of Poland.
Canadians are exempted from tourist visa requirements under a different program.
Rather, Poland’s absence is a bit of a surprise given the inclusion of even poorer eastern-bloc countries like Bulgaria.
Visa waiver isn’t exactly a walk in with no questions option, you still have to apply for an Electronic Travel Authorisation, which is like a visa except it exists as a note in border agents computers instead of a stamp in your passport.
An applicant still has to answer questions on the application and has a good chance of being asked them again somewhere on the journey, or at least I was.
Now this is still I’m sure a lot easier than getting even a tourist a visa, I had a look at the requirements and there is not only a longer form but an interview at the US embassy to go through, but no non-citizen is legally wandering in to the US the way you might cross the street.
The process looks complex but not unbearably so, more of an issue would be the requirements.
The presumption in the law is that every visitor visa applicant is an intending immigrant. Therefore, applicants for visitor visas must overcome this presumption by demonstrating that:
The purpose of their trip is to enter the U.S. for business, pleasure, or medical treatment;
That they plan to remain for a specific, limited period;
Evidence of funds to cover expenses in the United States;
Evidence of compelling social and economic ties abroad; and
That they have a residence outside the U.S. as well as other binding ties that will insure their return abroad at the end of the visit.
I imagine that someone willing to walk a few hundred miles for the chance at a job where they could be arrested at any time probably doesn’t have a lot of ‘funds to cover expenses’ or ‘compelling economic ties’ either one of which might be enough to stop the application.
I did a cursory look for more info but didn’t find it. So thanks a lot for the background!
I’m still struck by the profundity that nearly one in four babies born in the U.S. is born of non-citizen parents, and nearly one in ten babies born in the U.S. is born of non-citizen parents who are not in the country legally. That doesn’t mean these are “anchor babies,” to use the touchy term, but it does mean that we have been looking to non-nationals for a long time to keep our population replenished. Closed-border advocates seem deliberately ignorant of this fact when they insist that the border must be secured and no one be allowed to enter without authorization. Would they be willing to take the 8% hit to our birth rate that successful implementation of their policy would mean?
That would exacerbate our difficulties with Social Security a bit, wouldn’t it?
On the other hand, it might help with infant-mortality statistics.
While I, like many others in the comments here, am an open borders guy, what has always mystified me is how laborious we make the process of immigrating even in a non-open-borders context. We always hear from the right that people need to stand in line instead of skipping it, which is fair in some sense, but why is the line so long? What is the point of creating an immigration system that is so byzantine that it encourages millions of people to just skip it? I can’t imagine becoming an illegal immigrant or undocumented alien or whatever you want to call it is actually a super fun thing to do, so the fact that people do it indicates some amount of desperation on their part. Is there some reason we can’t make this a simpler process?
“Is there some reason we can’t make this a simpler process?”
Because all the brown people will steal our jobs and our welfare and our women! You have to EARN being an American… Standing in line is not enough! Oh, and toiling here for years, contributing to a system that often gives little or nothing back to you will not suffice either.
Well, I think there are two distinct issues, and I’m not sure which you are referring to.
The first is that when border hawks talk about the line, it cannot be emphasized enough that there is no line. Not for the vast majority of them. When much is made of the illegality of their presence and this is suggested to be indicative of the character of those breaking the law, my response is that when the laws are stacked against you, there really isn’t much incentive (logistically or morally) to follow the law. As Americans, we obey the law (to the extent we do) because it’s a part of a social contract that we belong to. They’re left out of the contract, and so there’s not much reason we should expect them to abide by it. (When I am driving through a speed trap in some town that I am going through, I will obey the speed limit for fear of getting caught, but I don’t see much of a moral requirement to do so. They stack the deck against people passing through.)
The second issue, for people who do have a way to get in legally, maybe, but elect to bypass the process. I am less sympathetic to this group, though still sympathetic to the trials of going up against the bureaucracy. That is, as much as anything, what I attribute it to. Ask any doctor and a lot of businesspeople about how complicated their paperwork requirements are, and you’ll sometimes get quite an earful from people who aren’t anti-government nuts (and with doctors, you’ll hear a lot about private-sector bureaucracy, too). It’s aggravating and often unnecessary, but it’s the American Way.
Here’s my theory:
It’s a vicious cycle that has to do with Mexico’s proximity to the US, politicians’ fear of being called racist, and the fact that Mexicans speak Spanish primarily.
When we talk about immigration, we’re mostly talking about “illegal immigration” and, really, when we’re talking about “illegal immigration”, we’re talking about Mexican immigration.
HOWEVER! Politicians can’t say “Mexican Immigration” without accusations of racism. So they say “Illegal Immigration” or, even worse, “Immigration”.
What is to be done about “Immigration”? Well, we can pass laws, add forms to the immigration process, make people take tests to demonstrate that they have certain amounts of education and/or are drug/disease free, so on and so forth. Essentially construct barriers for “Immigration”.
Meanwhile, the number one group of people immigrating here are pretty much walking here. Changing the number of forms from 24 to 25 will not impact them *AT ALL*. It only impacts the (everybody elses) who want to immigrate here… and that results in fewer of them immigrating here because, of course, the additional rules and forms and tests are doing their intended job: slowing/limiting immigration. The problem is that it has no impact on the immigrants who just walk here.
So what is a government to do? Well… you add another form. Another test. Make the barriers higher.
So… racism?
I don’t see “I wish they would speak English” as racism, per se. I mean, I suspect that they’d be seen as browner, poorer Canadians if English was the primary language.
I suspect that if Anglo-Canadians came into the US in very large numbers and occupied a conspicuous niche of low wage work in which they appeared to be in competition with other low waged workers, they would be racialized or ethnicized, at least to some extent. Maybe not as severely as if they had darker skin or didn’t speak English, but I think a lot of native-born Unitedstatesians, especially white ones, would begin noticing “differences” and begin being resentful of those differences and begin acting on that resentment.
I’m not being facetious. Historians–some of them, and not all agree on the extent or the severity–see the same thing as happening to the Irish in the 19th century. And a notion of “we/they are different people” is very present here in Chicago among the “white ethnics” (although admittedly, language differences are still pretty evident inmost of the non-Irish cases I am anecdotally aware of.).
Jaybird, Are you positive that you would feel the same if the walkers from the south were coming for your job?
Is this one of those things where you ask me if my kid was kidnapped, if I’d be willing to torture someone… and from there discuss what kinds of torture we should make legal?
No. This is one of those times when I would like to know if the undocumented people cost you money instead of saving you money you would still be in favor of open borders. I don’t know what you do for money, but I doubt if you are competing against them in the work market and I doubt if having too many blue collar people competing for too few jobs doesn’t save you money when you hire them to fix or build things you don’t know how to fix or build.
If I had to compete with cheap Mexican labor, I’m sure that I would dislike the thought of even more of those people hopping the border. I’d probably entertain the idea of petitioning the government to keep those people out.
Goodness knows, I said many a thing about Indians stealing our jobs, Singaporeans stealing our jobs, Malaysians stealing our jobs when I was working in a field that was being heavily outsourced to Asia.
I don’t think the immigration from Mexico can be seperated from the result of the war on drugs. It is true that drugs have empowered a specific portions of the population, but in response this has allowed the Mexican government to ramp up its police state.
Take a quick g-ogle image search of Mexico military and compare that to Canada military. The differences are obvious.
As America ramps up its police state the problem I see is that immigrants may be more than willing to support it here. To keep the peace, to assimilate.
The question of pushback surfaces. Will a immigrant be willing to push back against a police state within this country if they weren’t able to successfully push it back in their previous one?
Would they be willing to fight against a rebellion (if paid enough)? This is nothing new, the dates and countries have changed.
Enacting many laws under the Democrats, Liberals or Republicans will remain virtually impossible to pass. As an Independent my vote is not going to President Obama and the only reason I am voting for Mitt Romney, is to insure more TEA PARTY LEADERS unseat all those in Congress. I think potential VP Paul Ryan is a good choice, as he is yet another TEA PARTY politician? Any new laws that make financial sense have never had any possibility of enough votes in the House of Representatives and certainly not the Senate, held in contempt of the will of the people. With a steel grip in the Senate, and constantly failing to reach cloture by arch Liberal incumbent Sen. Harry Reid whatever in the way of bills of any need, will never reach the floor.
Both political Parties need to be held accountable for not passing the ‘Legal Workforce bill’ known exclusively as E-Verify (H.R.2885) or a crucial amendment known as the ‘Birthright Citizenship Law’ (H.R.140). The TEA PARTY however has this initiative that if they affirm more authority and influence in the Republican Party, these two laws will find passage. Join the local TEA PARTY and cast your vote for MITT ROMNEY. By infiltrating the Republican Party the TEA PARTY will have overall influence to stop illegal immigration, open up more oil drilling areas, a fair tax code for everybody; stop Obama from allowing the United Nations from more influencing in American laws, lower the U.S. treasury 16 Trillion dollar deficit and many controversial issues such as the in the Heritage foundation 2007 survey. That another mind numbing comprehensive amnesty; a certainty under President Obama and his czars would cost taxpayers $2.7 trillion to complete. This isn’t about any specific group of people; it is about illegal aliens—plain and simple.