From Huffington Post:
“Anchor babies” isn’t a very endearing term, but in Arizona those are the words being used to tag children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. While not new, the term is increasingly part of the local vernacular because the primary authors of the nation’s toughest and most controversial immigration law are targeting these tots — the legal weights that anchor many undocumented aliens in the U.S. — for their next move.
Buoyed by recent public opinion polls suggesting they’re on the right track with illegal immigration, Arizona Republicans will likely introduce legislation this fall that would deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona — and thus American citizens according to the U.S. Constitution — to parents who are not legal U.S. citizens. The law largely is the brainchild of state Sen. Russell Pearce, a Republican whose suburban district, Mesa, is considered the conservative bastion of the Phoenix political scene. He is a leading architect of the Arizona law that sparked outrage throughout the country: Senate Bill 1070, which allows law enforcement officers to ask about someone’s immigration status during a traffic stop, detainment or arrest if reasonable suspicion exists — things like poor English skills, acting nervous or avoiding eye contact during a traffic stop
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Shoot! Doesn’t everyone act nervous and avoid eye contract during a traffic stop? I know I sure do. If those behaviors are considered probable cause, then we are all in trouble.
“Anchor babies” is a highly offensive term. These kids have no control over their circumstances in life. And we certainly don’t know why their parents had them. To imply that any child comes in to this world solely to anchor one’s parents to the United States is simply wrong. Hopefully the term ‘anchor baby’ will soon become as politically RUDE as the term ‘pickaninny’ which was used fairly freely when I was a child.
Of course, this piece comes from Time Magazine, via Huffington Post: Arizona’s Next Immigration Target: Children of Illegals.
Illegals? 🙄 Unacceptable. Grammatically incorrect. Time Magazine needs to step it up a bit in the politically correct department. Or if they don’t want to be politically correct, how about using adjectives as adjectives and not as nouns.
One might contrast Arizona and New Mexico. Notice the silence out of Governor Bill Richardson’s state?
There are no easy answers but while we search we need to remember to be polite. We need to remember that those ‘anchor babies’ are just little children. In many ways, they are the most vulnerable members of this debate. They fear for themselves and they fear for their siblings and they fear for their parents. For some reason, too many Americans feel that these children simply don’t have feelings. And that is just dead wrong!
