Financial Cost of Anchor Babies
"Cristobal Silverio came illegally from Oxtotilan, Mexico, in 1997 and brought his wife Felipa, plus three children aged 19, 12 and 8. Felipa ... gave birth to a new daughter, her anchor baby, named Flor. Flor was premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator, and cost San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, (Felipa's 19-year-old daughter) Lourdes plus her illegal alien husband produced their own anchor baby, Esmeralda. Grandma Felipa created a second anchor baby, Cristian. ... The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding. Flor gets $600 per month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. Cristobal and Felipa last year earned $18,000 picking fruit. Flor and Cristian were paid $12,000 for being anchor babies."(1)
In the Silverios' munificent new hometown of Stockton, Calif., 70 percent of the 2,300 babies born in 2003 in the San Joaquin General Hospital were anchor babies. As of this month, Stockton is $23 million in the hole.(2)
When anchor babies reach 21, they qualify for a host of federal, state and local benefit programs, and can sponsor the immigration of other members of the family.
A baby born in the United States is considered a citizen regardless of the mother's citizenship status. The United States is the last country in the industrial world to grant citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. Anchor babies automatically become dual citizens - the US and their parents native country.(3) The United Kingdom and Australia repealed their U.S. style policy in the 1980s after witnessing abuses similar to those plaguing the U.S. today. The last country in the European Union to do away with birthright citizenship was Ireland in 2004. Why does the United States continue to allow a practice subject to widespread fraud? The answer lies in how the US judiciary has interpreted the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868 in order to nullify the Supreme Courts infamous “Dred Scott” decision of 1857, which ruled that blacks were property, not citizens of the US and had no Constitutional rights. The 14th amendment states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States... The 14th amendment was intended solely to give citizenship to freed black slaves. Senator Jacob Howard, Co-author of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, wrote in 1866: "Every Person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”
The door was opened to anchor babies In 1898. In U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th amendment didn’t just apply to freed negro slaves, but to anyone born in the US, who automatically becomes a citizen.Even with this ruling, anchor babies did not become a problem until the massive expansion of the welfare state, thanks to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s. Since then, the floodgates have opened wider and wider, resulting in the disaster we have today with anchor babies.
When the 14th amendment was crafted, the United States had no immigration policy, and thus the authors saw no need to state explicitly, what they believed was understood. The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was intended to exclude from automatic citizenship children born to non-citizens who had no allegiance to the United States.
Average Americans fail to understand the enormous ramifications of 400,000 anchor babies born within the United States each year. They swamp our hospitals, ER wards and school systems. They cost taxpayers billions for ‘free’ breakfasts and lunches along with English as a Second Language classes. Many of them flunk out of high school, at which point, they either become pregnant themselves or join gangs, and then fill our prisons.
According to Marjorie Greenfield, MD, on the Dr. Spock website, in 2001 the average cost of having a baby in the U.S. ranged from $6,000 to $8,000 for a normal vaginal delivery and $10,000 to $12,000 for a cesarean birth. If the $8,000 cost is used for 2007 births, and all 380,000 babies born to illegal immigrants in the U.S. all had normal deliveries, this would cost hospitals around the country approximately $3 billion. But if there are 726,000 anchor babies born in the U.S. each year, the cost skyrockets to nearly $6 billion.(4)
According to Edwin Rubenstein, National Research Center, 2008 report, showed unlawful immigration costing American taxpayers $346 billion in Fiscal year 2007.(5) The study lists15 federal agencies that incur massive payouts for illegals.(6)
Illiegal immigration places a heavy burden on the federal budget. The costs associated with illegals are due to their American-born children, who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth. Thus, greater efforts at barring illegals from federal programs will not reduce costs because their citizen children can continue to access them.
Source:
1. Spring 2005 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
2. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38409
3. https://www.usimmigrationsupport.org/dual-citizenship.html
4. http://www.aim.org/special-report/6-billion-a-year-for-mexican-anchor-babies/
5. http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_18_2/tsc_18_2_rubenstein_e pilog.shtml
6. http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_18_2/index.shtml
Sections in this Article
Sections in this Article:
Immigration, a historical perspective
Immigration or Invasion? You make the call
How to Fix America's Immigration System
Illegal immigration is bad for America
No blanket amnesty for illegals