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by Niall O'Dowd

Anchor babies a big lie in immigration reform battle

Posted on Sunday, August 08, 2010 at 06:49 AM
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The anti-immigrant hysteria about 'anchor babies' is a complete fallacy.

Right wing shows are full of talk about Mexicans coming here to have children so that their parents can become legal.

It is complete nonsense and Rush Limbaugh and others know it.

A child cannot claim a parent until the child is 21 years under U.S. immigration law.

But the naysayers would have you believe it is an immediate process.

It is not , nothing close to it.

But the hardliners prefer to let the poisonous rhetoric flow rather than face the facts.

Amazingly, Senator Lindsay Graham has now joined the 'anchor babies' crusade.

He has called for every person born to an undocumented person to be considered illegal too.

In fairness, that is what the Irish government currently considers the law.

There is one significant difference however. In Ireland such babies once automatically transferred citizenship to their parents.

That is not what the law is in America.

Chasing down new born children and deporting them on the spot smacks of Nazism not the great American democracy.

I have often pointed out that were today's restrictions in place the ancestors of Ronald Reagan or John F.Kennedy would never have made it to America.

We need a reasoned debate on immigration not just ignorant armies clashing by night.

God knows we could do with it.



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45 Comments

15 - 45 | See all comments

GeorgeDillon | Aug 10, 2010, 03:31 PM EDT
Twenty grand is very expensive. Sounds like there's an opening in the bankrupt Irish economy for someone to start a business bringing in heavily pregnant women. As someone else pointed out, there's already a business in Eastern European women of suspect virtue taking a few days off their busy schedules in Warsaw or wherever in order to fly into Ireland and show their faces at the Irish Marriage Registry accompanied by their proud husband, Mr Ali or Singh or whatever. Once it's all done and dusted, and the fee changes hands, it's back to Warsaw a few thousand bucks richer for the blushing bride. Ali of course gets to stay in Ireland because he's now the loving husband of a European woman whom he'll never see again.

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FastEddy | Aug 10, 2010, 02:09 PM EDT
CBS Snooze item yesterday, 8/9/2010: Hong Kong Chinese TV advertises a US$20,000 package including roundtrip airfare and english speaking chinese doctor bill to have your chinese baby born in USA "with US citizenship papers". Can Ireland beat that? Come on, you can do better!

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bonjouryall | Aug 09, 2010, 08:57 PM EDT
WoundedKnee, it sounds like you know more than I do and I thank you for your comment. In my defense, I did not assert the comment as fact (it sounds as if the difference is more practical than legal?) and yes I am getting more information on the topic-unfortunately, however, but very little from the written articles on IrishCentral. While one should take everything with a grain of salt, there's often more substance from the commenters than in the articles. (Of course, it does whip up a reading frenzy for the website this way-me included!)

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hancock | Aug 09, 2010, 08:52 PM EDT
That was tongue in cheek tansey, read it again, I apologize for not realizing everybody has my tolerance for sarcasm. I was highlighting once again the the open border crowd and their disdain for anybody who disagrees with them, esspecially if they have intimate knowledge of the problem.

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allentown | Aug 09, 2010, 08:35 PM EDT
The illegal alien parents must go home. They decide if they want to take their American born child with them, or leave them in the U.S. Loving parents will take their child home with them and apply to enter the U.S. legally.

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tanseyj | Aug 09, 2010, 03:38 PM EDT
I have always been proud of my Irish heritage! Proud that my ancesters are Irish! Loved the 2 visits I have made to Ireland! But to be called a 'Nazi' by Hancock is not my idea of the Irish people. Hope he is very much the exception to the rule? If he lived here on the border I am sure he would think differently. Nothing wrong with legal immegration, my wife has a 'green card'. I have many Mexican neighbors and they are great people. The ones I have talked to, do not agree with Illegals in the state of AZ. They are citizens, the legal way. I am sure my ancesters came here legally. But times have changed in this country. There are thousands of people who want to become citizens here, legally. Many, including Irish, have to waid many years. That is the correct and legal way to do it. Feel sorry for Hancock and his outlook on this American problem!

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WoundedKnee | Aug 09, 2010, 02:40 PM EDT
DLW: "Nobody would deport a baby, therefore, nobody will deport the illegal parents." You got it. That's exactly what happens in Ireland. It explains the throngs of Africans and Chinese you see on Dublin's North Side. The country is broke, yet it's spending hundreds of millions on these people and their children. The last time I went to Dublin an African guy welcomed us to Ireland when the Continental Airlines plane door was opened. The previous time it has been an Eastern European woman, maybe Russian. You mean the Irish can't find an Irish man or woman to welcome a plane to Ireland? Then the Irish must be imbeciles.

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WoundedKnee | Aug 09, 2010, 02:34 PM EDT
I don't know what a Lecturer in Migration Studies studies, but a walk thru downtown Dublin is enough to show that Ireland has pursued a truly crazy policy of Mass Immigration. We don't need to take a course with this guy McEnri to see that he is talking garbage. For example, he quibbles about anchor babies bestowing citizenship on their parents, but the fact is that the Irish government permitted virtually all the parents of these anchor babies to remain in Ireland, even AFTER the people voted to deny the babies citizenship. And once the parents were let stay in Ireland they were on the road to citizenship, because Ireland has extremely lax Naturalization requirements. And I bet McEnri would be the loudest to yelp "wacism" if the Irish government had ever exercised their right to throw these people out of the country. It's disgusting also to see McEnri defend the marriages of convenience that are occurring in Ireland. A month or two ago some woman from Latvia flew in to Ireland, supposedly to marry some pakistani whom she had never met before. The aim? The Pakistani gets to stay in Ireland thru marriage to an EU citizen, the Latvian gets to pocket a few thousand euro before she flies home the next day. And I note he doesn't mention the Lecturer in Immigration Studies nowhere mentions the Chinese woman, who really brought the problem to a head in Ireland. She wanted to settle in Britain, and had not the slightest interst in Ireland. But--and I got to admit she was pretty sharp--she saw the loophole provided by the Irish Constitution, which gave Irish citizenship to anyone born on the island of Ireland. So off she went to Belfast to have her baby! McEnri apparently thinks it's wonderful that such foreigners can connive to subvert Irish law in this fashion, I say it's a disgrace. I don't know what college McEnri works for, but's he's an idiot.

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jflanagan | Aug 09, 2010, 12:46 PM EDT
After reading Niall for a few months now I can only come to one conclusion. He never leaves the pub in NYC and relies on hallucinations brought on by being overserved to come to his "reasoned debate" points. Niall has obviously never been to Nogales, Brownsville or any border cities with problems of trespassing, shooting, harassment, threats and property destruction.

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AmAncINED | Aug 09, 2010, 12:20 PM EDT
You left-wingers who want to welcome illegal immigrants into this country to have their babies should line up and start paying the bills for their support. Many of you sit in New York where you don't have a clue what it's like in the border states. How many hospitals have you visited in border states, Niall, to see what's going on? Have you talked to anyone in the Billing dept.? There was a hospital in Texas that was profiled on NBC for "going under" because they were overwhelmed by illegal immigrants using their services, including childbirth and follow-up care. They were treating many mothers & babies who had complications. Obama is going to make all Americans buy health insurance but the ILLEGALS will continue to get their healthcare for FREE!!!! You shouldn't be writing about things you don't have a clue about. Make a trip to Texas, Arizona, Calif., and do some real research. And don't compare what the Nazis did to American immigration policies. That's so assinine.

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maceinri | Aug 09, 2010, 11:48 AM EDT
I agree with the general thrust of this article, but it contains an unfortunate error. In Ireland 'anchor babies' never automatically 'transferred citizenship to their parents'. Instead, caselaw since the Fajujonu case in 1989 meant that the parent(s) of an Irish-born child could assert a right to residence in Ireland in order that the Irish citizen child could have his/her parents to provide protection and support. That is not the same thing as citizenship although many such parents, having lived for the requisite minimum of five years in Ireland, went on to become Irish citizens. The 2004 referendum changed the heretofore automatic nature of citizenship conferred on any child born in Ireland, thus removing the basis for claims to residence on the grounds of being parents of an Irish citizen. Moreover, the State has shown itself quite prepared to refuse residence rights in various other, related cases, including cases of the non-Irish, non-EU spouse of an Irish or EU citizen, on various questionable grounds, e.g. the alleged 'bogus marriages' even though the State keeps losing such cases in the courts and there are other means of verifying whether a marriage is bogus or not. Niall O'Dowd's point about poisonous rhetoric is quite right. The 2004 referendum in Ireland was accompanied by quite disgraceful and unsustainable claims about thousands of pregnant women arriving on aircraft in this country, even though the vast majority of babies born to foreign-born women in Ireland were cases where the women in question had every right to be here. The Government's irresponsible rhetoric stoked the fires of racist and anti-immigrant sentiment. Piaras Mac Einri Lecturer in Migration Studies Department of Geography UCC

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howareya | Aug 09, 2010, 11:21 AM EDT
haasny007...you are wrong in that it is only because they are illegal that Spanish speaking illegals don't assimilate! I know quite a few that are legal due to the amnesty back in the 80's and they still can't speak English and send the money home with no intention of becoming a US citizen or learning the language of the land.

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JohnMMcL | Aug 09, 2010, 10:18 AM EDT
Immagrant laws in both U.S. and Ireland need to be updated. I have witnessed first hand the arrogance of the rather large African imagrants pushing their way through shopping areas and down streets. Most of these immagrants are invading Ireland too live off the dole. All countries need to be a bit selective in who comes their shores.

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DLW12183 | Aug 09, 2010, 10:08 AM EDT
Niall--your left wing rhetoric shows how stupid you really are. Nobody would deport a baby, therefore, nobody will deport the illegal parents. We will grant them the right to stay. What part don't you understand. Nazi's didn't depot people to get rid of them--they killed them. You can't compare the Nazi policy to deportation of illegal aliens from US soil. Get a life.

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jflanagan | Aug 09, 2010, 09:15 AM EDT
My post at 10:36 last night had the wrong years cited. It should have been that in 2003 there were 2.8 million babies born to illegal aliens in existence and in 2008 there were 3.8 million. Late night and got tired of trying to find the story on the internet to check the dates. Sorry for the slight misinformation.

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