Why Are We Rewarding Illegals For Having Anchor Babies In Our Country?

08 Apr, 2008 by John Hawkins

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By allowing illegal aliens to get pregnant, waltz across our border, and get free health care and citizenship for their children, we’re encouraging the worst sort of behavior.

It was 5 a.m. and CBS News national correspondent Byron Pitts is with a woman who is nine months pregnant. She’s rushed to a south Texas hospital to undergo a C-section – a $4,700 medical procedure that won’t cost her a dime. She qualifies for emergency Medicaid.

She gave birth to a healthy, 8 1/2 pound baby boy – born in America. His Mexican mother gave him an American name: Eliot.

Eliot is one of an estimated 300,000 children of illegal immigrants born in the United States every year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. They’re given instant citizenship because they are born on U.S. soil, which makes it easier for their parents to become U.S. citizens.

That’s because those babies can eventually sponsor their parents – when they turn 21 years old.

…Back in December, when she was six months pregnant, Fabiola, her husband and their two daughters – ages 4 and 11 – crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into the U.S.

Once on the other side of the river they walked for two hours in search of a better life and free medical care for their unborn child.

“Do many women in Mexico make the choice to have their children in the United States?” Pitts asked.

“Yes,” she said through a translator. “I know people who have done that. Things are much better here in the U.S. because they help children so much more.”

It’s a “better” life … that American taxpayers help pay for.

Take healthcare for example — an estimated $1.1 billion per year for undocumented men, women and children, according to the Rand Corporation.

Joe Riley is the CEO of the McAllen Texas Medical Center near the Texas-Mexico border. Forty percent of the children born there, nearly 2,400 last year, were the babies of illegal immigrants.

Riley has seen and heard it all.

“Mothers about to give birth that walk up to the hospital still wet from swimming across the river in actual labor … dirty, wet, cold,” he said.

But here to have a child?

“Here to have a child in the U.S.,” he said.

That child? He shouldn’t be granted American citizenship. That mother? She should be permanently banned from getting citizenship or even visiting the U.S. at all — and the government of Mexico should be sent a $4700 bill for the medical care she received.

Why? Because when you subsidize behavior, you get more of it. So, if we reward women for coming into the United States illegally and having babies — which is exactly what our system does today — we shouldn’t be surprised when they do just that.

PS: If you look carefully at the wording of the 14th Amendment, I do think we could constitutionally deny birthright citizenship to the children of illegals.

Also see,

Fixing Illegal Immigration In 10 Common Sense Steps