...if Jefferson Sessions had a legitimate fear about "anchor babies" when he said:I’m not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind, but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen.
Ezra Klein clears it up in a blog post today:
It's important to note that having an "anchor baby" won't do much to help a Mexican mom become a U.S. citizen. Because citizen children cannot sponsor their parents for citizenship until they turn 21 -- and because if the parents were ever illegal, they would have to return home for 10 years before applying to come in -- having a baby to secure citizenship for its parents is an extremely long-term, and uncertain, process.
As for whether we're really seeing what Lindsey Graham called "drop and leave," in which immigrant parents head over and give birth and then head back to their home countries to wait 31 years for citizenship, well, as you might expect, "immigration data and surveys don't provide much support for Graham's notion."
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