By Chelsea Meacham
The reproductive lives of women of color have long been the site of intense political debate and intervention. Perhaps the most prominent iteration of this debate in current political discourse is that surrounding immigrant mothers and the phenomenon of the “anchor baby.” Although framed on the surface as a debate about children and birthright citizenship, the “anchor baby” conversation is more about mothers than it is about babies. At its root, it is a racialized and eugenic debate about who should and should not be having children—where and when they should or should not be having them.
When politicians and other public figures invoke the language of anchor babies, they are nearly always talking about Latino populations. Because citizenship status cannot be physically “read” on the body the way race can, race becomes a marker for immigration and citizenship status so that Latino populations, whether documented, undocumented, or U.S.-born, collectively become the primary targets of anti-immigration attacks. The language of the “anchor baby” implies a calculated move by undocumented Latino parents to establish ties to U.S. citizenship through their children. However, this language provides a false sense of rootedness and security, dramatically disconnected from the reality of forced deportations and familial separations faced by families of mixed legal status.
Historical Context and the Fourteenth Amendment
U.S. citizenship is embedded in a deep history of racialized inclusion and exclusion. The Fourteenth Amendment, which establishes citizenship and equal protection for all individuals born or naturalized in the U.S., was ratified in 1868 following the end of the U.S. Civil War in order to ensure citizenship for previously enslaved people. However, the particular phrasing of the amendment allows for interpretations in which certain subjects can still be excluded. The text of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The ambiguous stipulation that citizens must be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the state has been historically used to exclude certain subjects in distinctly racialized ways. Although it is currently interpreted to exclude only the U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats, this clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been interpreted in specific historical moments to deny citizenship rights to certain racial and ethnic groups.
Although it did not explicitly address the citizenship status of indigenous populations, the Fourteenth Amendment was carefully worded in order to exclude most indigenous peoples from citizenship rights. In 1884, the Supreme Court heard the case of Elk v. Wilkins after John Elk moved off of the indigenous Ho-Chunk reservation and attempted to vote in Nebraska but was denied voting rights. The court found that Elk was not “subject to U.S. jurisdiction” because he was born on an indigenous reservation, and was therefore ineligible for citizenship rights including voting. In 1924, however, Congress passed legislation that granted citizenship to indigenous groups within the U.S.
During the late 1880’s, exclusionist groups who hoped to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants argued that Chinese immigrants, and their children by extension, had allegiances to their home countries and therefore were not subject to U.S. jurisdiction or eligible for birthright citizenship. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1898 in USA v. Wong Kim Ark that these U.S.-born children were and are indeed citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, similar arguments continue to emerge among anti-immigration activists who hope to establish tighter parameters for birthright citizenship.
Consensual Citizenship and the Racialized Immigrant
In “Characterizing Consent: Race, Citizenship, and the New Restrictionists,” Robin Jacobson traces a history of movements to restrict or eliminate birthright citizenship. Jacobson argues that while the frameworks used by those advocating for consensual citizenship have changed over the years, the process of racialization implicit in these arguments has remained more or less constant.
In the early to mid-1990s, anti-immigration activists primarily adopted a framework of economic “fairness” to claim that immigrants and their children represented an economic burden on the country that comes at the cost of “legitimate” (presumably white, economically autonomous) citizens. Many argued for a citizenship based on “mutual consent” rather than birthright in which these “legitimate” citizens decide who is eligible and ineligible for citizenship. Jacobson writes, “In theory, consensual citizenship is not race based and may seem emancipatory; in practice, however, consensual citizenship can be dangerous” (645). Although presented as a “colorblind” approach to determining citizenship, this method of consensual citizenship relies on a racialized understanding of Latino immigrants as an “economic drain and prone to violating the law.”[i] This supposedly “colorblind” method of conferring citizenship is simply incompatible with the United States’ history and reality of racism and racialized citizenship. In a country where the majority of citizens have parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents who were immigrants, consensual citizenship is racialized so that “earning” legitimate citizenship is predicated on whiteness. A second or third generation Latino immigrant is marked by race in a way that the white European immigrant is not. For these reasons, Jacobson contends that maintaining birthright citizenship is “essential for avoiding racial injustice.”[ii]
The argument that immigrant families represent an “economic drain” on U.S. resources quickly loses momentum when we consider the way families of mixed legal status exist at a particularly vulnerable space within the U.S. For families in which some members (usually children) have legal status while others (parents and older siblings) do not, the specter of deportation is a constant and looming threat. Even when citizen children are eligible for and in need of social services, these mixed-status families often choose not to seek out public assistance out of fear of deportation and uncertainty about their eligibility for such services. The argument that immigrants and their U.S.-born children abuse public safety-net programs is inconsistent with the reality that U.S. welfare policy has made it extremely difficult for both documented and undocumented immigrants to access public services since the Welfare Reform of the mid 1990s. Moreover, framing families who are able to successfully seek out these services as undeserving and improper citizens creates a slippery slope upon which only those who are completely autonomous are considered full and proper citizens.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the conversation around birthright citizenship shifted from a focus on economic “fairness” to a panic around “invasion.” This deeply affective framing of immigration as an ideological and physical threat to the U.S. polity became particularly salient in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent “War on Terror,” in which brown bodies came to represent an imminent threat to national security. This led to a “hardening” of the border that was informed by a conglomerate of panic over terrorism, drugs, and immigration. The alignment of an anti-immigration agenda with the “War on Drugs” as well as the “War on Terror” “helps to create not just an exclusionary context, but also a violent one,” in which the physical and legal abuse and exclusion of Latino immigrants is framed as both normal and necessary.[iii] Undocumented immigrants are seen as a threat to the very foundation of the United States, as having committed a violent and unforgivable crime against U.S. ideals. Within this shifting framework, Latino immigrants, and their U.S.-born children by extension, are seen as undesirable citizens primarily because of their inability or refusal to assimilate more so than their ostensible economic dependency. This framing of consensual citizenship calls into question “the genuine desire of the individual prospective member,” so that citizenship is no longer something to be determined and legitimized by the general polity, but to be proven by the individual immigrant.[iv] Jacobson conceptualizes this as a shift from “republican” to “liberal” notions of consensual citizenship. In this way, failure to conform to U.S. notions of ideal citizenship is framed as an individual rather than systemic failure; the Latino immigrant is blamed for failing to achieve a level of citizenship that was never really on the table to begin with.
Jacobson notes that “the exclusionary force of consensual citizenship is not accidental or incidental but is at the core of the concept.”[v] Consensual citizenship necessarily involves determining who is a desirable or undesirable citizen, and this often happens in gendered and racialized ways. Because the concern with birthright citizenship is, at its core, a concern about reproduction, the anxiety around citizenship and immigration centers around Latina immigrant women’s reproductive lives and bodies. The Latina immigrant woman is framed as a hyper-fertile and hyper-reproductive figure who is “unable or unwilling to be self-supporting.”[vi] The Latina immigrant poses the greatest threat to the U.S. because of her supposed ability to reproduce at an alarming rate, creating a sort of “racial invasion.” Although the “economic burden” and the “invasion” narratives are not incompatible and have long existed alongside one another, the debate around immigration and birthright citizenship has tended to emphasize one over the other at various political moments in order to reify racialized notions of who is a proper and legitimate citizen.
The currently popular language of the “anchor baby” implies that the children of Latino immigrants serve as tools for establishing firm roots in the U.S. Anti-immigration activists often claim that immigrant parents choose to have children in the U.S. so that these children will grow up and sponsor their naturalization process. However, a child cannot sponsor their parents’ naturalization until they are at least twenty-one years old. In order to realize such an elaborate scheme, a family would have to face the very real threat of deportation for a minimum of twenty-one years before being able to even begin the process of naturalization. In 2011 alone, an estimated 46,000 undocumented immigrant parents were separated from their U.S.-born children through processes of deportation.[vii] Even when deportation never actually occurs, the mere threat of deportation puts extreme stress on mixed-status families. For an undocumented parent, the decision to have children in the U.S. is not a one-way ticket to citizenship; undocumented parents who choose to have children in the U.S. are likely aware of the prevalent dangers and challenges of living in the U.S. as a mixed-status family. The assumption that Latino immigrant families have children in order to secure citizenship and access public services does violence to the very real personal and affective aspects of family making and the severity of the specter of separation, and reduces the decisions Latino families make about where and when to have children to calculated citizenship schemes.
Citizenship and Access to Reproductive Services
Because it is at its core a debate about women’s bodies and reproductive lives, the “anchor baby” debate is inextricable from a larger conversation about reproductive rights and health. Many undocumented women lack access to reproductive health services, including contraceptives, abortions, and other family planning services. A woman’s undocumented status may actually constrain her ability to decide when, where, and under what circumstances she has a child. This reality directly challenges the notion of the “anchor baby” as a calculated decision. An undocumented woman who becomes pregnant unintentionally may attempt a self-induced abortion, or may be forced to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term and realize the narrative of the “anchor baby.” In this way, motherhood becomes a racialized terrain in which certain women’s reproduction is framed as virtuous while others’ is framed as selfish, illegitimate, and excessive. Immigrant Latina women, and particularly undocumented women, are excluded from the category of the “good mother” due to their immigration status; they cannot be “proper” mothers because they cannot raise “proper” citizens. Immigrant women struggle to access prenatal care and other services that allow a mother to meet her family’s basic needs and establish herself as a good mother. Leisy J. Abrego and Cecilia Menjívar label this a “form of legal violence that not only restricts immigrant women’s ability to mother their children but also brings about suffering to these women as mothers.”[viii] The Latina immigrant woman’s mothering and citizenship are politicized and policed in a way that the white, middle-class U.S. mother’s is not. Because U.S. nationalism is inextricable from U.S. notions of family values, discourses of nationalism and “good motherhood” become entangled in one another, such that the immigrant mother is vilified twofold through the mutually enforcing categories of the “bad mother” and the “bad immigrant.”
Angela Hooton and Silvia Henriquez note a strange contradiction that emerges in the overlap between the pro-life movement and the anti-immigrant movement. They write:
There is no question that policy-makers place little value on the health of the expectant mothers, outside of their role as incubator for a citizen child…[M]others are denied health care coverage because of their immigration status, but their fetuses have certain privileges based on their future citizenship! The “support” for immigrant women’s fetuses dissipates quickly, however, because once the children are born they become part of the “immigration problem.”[ix]
Hooton and Henriquez call attention to the fact that those who advocate a pro-life agenda are often the same activists who are vocally opposed to citizenship for “anchor babies.” In this way, the soon-to-be-citizen fetuses of immigrant women are perhaps seen as more valuable in the womb than they are once delivered, as conservatives’ priorities shift from a pro-life agenda on behalf of the fetus to an anti-immigration agenda in opposition to the Latino family.
Some anti-immigration activists even advocate sterilization of undocumented women to prevent “irresponsible” and undesirable pregnancies. In an opinion piece on “anchor babies” and welfare benefits published in a West Virginia newspaper, Harold E. Butler writes, “I am opposed to abortions, but not to having tubes tied and males having vasectomies to prevent irresponsible pregnancies.” Butler puts the “anchor baby” debate in direct conversation with a reproductive rights agenda in a way that advocates overtly eugenic practices for determining which women are proper mothers and which children are legitimate citizens.
Birthright Citizenship and Chinese “Birth Tourism”
Latino populations are not the only communities of color charged with abusing U.S. birthright citizenship. In recent years, notable news outlets such as Bloomberg Business, The New York Times, and the Huffington Post have published stories on the rise of “birth tourism” or “maternity tourism” among affluent Chinese women, who spend large sums of money to come to the U.S. to give birth. Giving birth to children in the U.S. has been appealing to Chinese women and their families for a number of reasons, including access to better healthcare and medication, less exposure to airborne pollutants for newborns, and evasion of China’s infamous one-child policy. Perhaps most alluring, however, is the fact that all children born within the U.S. under the industry of “maternity tourism” are granted U.S. citizenship, a valuable asset in terms of future educational opportunities and other social and economic perks.
Some restrictionists have drawn parallels between Chinese “maternity tourism” and the Latino “anchor baby.” However, these phenomena are quite distinct in several important ways. First, Chinese women come to the U.S. for the explicit and exclusive purpose of having a child, and have no intention of staying in the U.S. longer than is necessary for the delivery and recovery period. Drawing a parallel between the phenomena of birth tourism and of the “anchor baby” perpetuates the false idea that pregnant Latina women are waiting at the border to come deliver their babies in the U.S. and carefully and calculatedly establish ties to citizenship. Second, Chinese “birth tourism” is a quite lucrative industry, in which mothers-to-be pay tens of thousands of dollars for airfare, visas, hospital bills, and lavish apartment buildings where they stay before and after giving birth. With names like “USA Happy Baby” and “American Angel 8,” these service providers charge huge sums to provide women with a luxurious and almost fairytale-like experience. Chinese women who participate in this maternity tourism are generally quite affluent, especially compared to undocumented immigrants who come from Latin America and often work low-wage jobs without benefits. In a piece for Bloomberg Business, Susan Berfield notes that a typical maternity tourism customer staying in the Los Angeles area stayed an apartment rented to her by the maternity tourism company that included a pool, fitness center, views of the San Gabriel mountains, and a nanny—who was not unlikely an immigrant woman of color herself.
The news articles in which stories of maternity tourism appear are also quite distinct from those that depict the crisis of the “anchor baby.” While pieces about “anchor babies” often provide viewpoints and political commentaries from both immigration and anti-immigration activists, only the pieces on maternity tourism provide direct interviews with the mothers themselves. One Chinese woman qualifies her experience of motherhood and immigration:
[My mother] instilled in our minds that you are not to go on welfare. You’ve got to work hard and support yourself, and you don’t depend on the government for anything…I see the two Chinese families that I’ve crossed paths with and they’re the same way. They’re not taking advantage of the system.[x]
The Chinese woman attempts to distance herself from the “bad” (presumably Latino) immigrant who “takes advantage of the system” by relying on welfare and other government services. Although both groups of mothers are vilified in their own way, Chinese women who take part in birth tourism are not plagued by the threat of deportation the way the Latina mother is, and as a result perhaps have more agency, visibility and control over their own image.
While it is not illegal to come to the U.S. to give birth, it is illegal to lie about the purpose of a visit. For this reason, Chinese birth tourism is seen as a sort of “legal gray area.” Homeland Security is “cracking down” on maternity tourism, but its focus seems to be more on the companies arranging the trips than on the women themselves. Chinese women who participate in maternity tourism are perhaps protected by their wealth and by their particular racialization as “model minorities” from suffering the level of stigma and backlash that Latina immigrant mothers face. They are encouraged to keep all invoices from their hospital visits in order to prove that they “didn’t use the public charge [welfare].”[xi] This advice reflects the language of the Welfare Reform legislation passed in the 1990s, which served as an “administrative tool to exclude or deport those immigrants perceived to be or to have the possibility of becoming a burden on the state.”[xii] Under this iteration of Welfare Reform, public assistance is framed not as a right or necessity but as a charitable act for which some subjects are simply unworthy, and dependency is framed as a “pathological disease indicative of those with such weak moral constitution that they are unable to self-regulate and make the ‘right’ choices.”[xiii] It is not the actual pursuit of state support that is grounds for exclusion from citizenship, but rather the conditions that might produce any sort of need for assistance—including, in some cases, need for pre- and postnatal healthcare.[xiv] For some immigrant women, dependence on the state is quite literally criminalized. In this way, the citizenship resulting from maternity tourism that may otherwise be seen as illegitimate is justified by the parents’ ability to pay for the services involved. Chinese maternity tourists and their children represent the “right” kind of immigrants and citizens. Proponents of birth tourism argue that it bolsters the U.S. economy, similar to other forms of tourism. Unlike the language of the “anchor baby” which suggests a tethering of oneself and one’s family to the U.S. through the citizen child, “maternity tourism” suggests a temporary and even pleasant vacation. Despite critiques of both phenomena, the language of the “anchor baby” is markedly more hostile.
In “Criminalizing Immigrant Mothers: Public Charge, Health Care, and Welfare Reform,” Lisa Sun-Hee Park asks, “[If] neoliberalism promises that less government surveillance and more privatization will lead to greater individual freedom…this assertion raises a crucial question: For whom?”[xv] While transnationalism and birthright citizenship appear to open up unique citizenship opportunities for certain “desirable” Chinese subjects, Latino subjects are excluded from enjoying the “benefits” of neoliberal individualism, and are actually subjected to even more heightened surveillance under these neoliberal conditions. Park notes that the “de-regulation” of certain “desirable” subjects which produces the conditions for maternity tourism is dependent on the “re-regulation” or hyper-regulation of other “less desirable” subjects.
Still, many conservative groups and figures also speak negatively of Chinese maternity tourism, although not as harshly as they do of the Latino “anchor baby.” Their insistent protests despite the affluence and lucrative nature of the Chinese maternity tourism industry suggest that for many conservatives, the panic around both maternity tourism and “anchor babies” is less about a scarcity of physical or economic resources and more about the maintenance of a predominantly white U.S. racial fabric and the idea of U.S. citizenship as sacred ground to be protected against invasion from racial “outsiders.”
2016 Presidential Election
The use of the term “anchor babies” has been the subject of heated debate between political parties in the 2016 presidential election. Some republican candidates, such as Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, have defended their use of the term despite criticism from Latino and other immigration activist groups. Both men seemed to chalk up the debate around the term to a question of semantics, contending that they could not avoid using the offensive language of the “anchor baby” for lack of an alternative term. Although immigration activists have offered alternatives such as “children of undocumented immigrants,” Trump and Bush have continued to opt for “anchor baby,” signaling an awareness of the importance of the racially coded nature of the term that is not captured by the differently coded phrase “children of undocumented immigrants.” UCLA law professor Hiroshi Motomura describes the use of this language as a “war of soundbites” used by certain presidential candidates to elicit a particular response. Some conservative politicians invoke the language of the “anchor baby” to appeal to a specific audience by framing certain citizens as illegitimate and a “threat” to “real” American families to produce fear among voters. The “anchor baby,” then, is a symbolic figure invoked by presidential hopefuls as part of an anti-immigration agenda. In this way, the racialized, unwanted, illegitimate “anchor baby” is framed simultaneously as a helpless victim of manipulative and irresponsible parents, and as a malicious enemy or potential enemy of the State.
Conclusions
The narrative of the “anchor baby” is deeply embedded in histories of race, class, and gender. The term “anchor baby” and the ideologies it represents establish immigrant women’s bodies and reproductive lives as subject to constant government surveillance. Through this coded language, the abstract concept of citizenship becomes marked on the body through race, so that all Latino families, whether immigrant or native-born, documented or undocumented, represent the “threat” of immigration and the anchor baby. Discussions of immigration are inextricably tied to concerns about motherhood and reproduction as well as healthcare and public assistance. Through discussions of phenomena such as “birth tourism” and the “anchor baby,” reproduction becomes a site where citizenship is policed in distinctly racialized ways. In this way, it is not undocumented Latino parents that utilize “anchor babies” to solidify their position within the U.S., but anti-immigration activists who use the figure of the “anchor baby” to racialize citizenship and belonging. The deeply affective nature of the “anchor baby” discussion provides a landscape for tracing the parameters of citizenship and belonging. Even for those for whom citizenship is a legal reality, many political figures attempt to draw distinctions between those who are “deserving” and “undeserving” citizens, often along racial and ethnic lines. Lisa Sun-Hee Park asserts that these conditions produce “a multi-tiered state in which the freedoms and rights of some are maintained by the reciprocal restriction on those same freedoms and rights of others.”[xvi] In other words, the white U.S. mother and the white U.S. child’s citizenship and belonging are dependent on the exclusion of the Latino immigrant family and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese birth tourist family. The discourse of the “anchor baby” is part and parcel of a broader history of politicizing and policing women of color’s reproductive lives, echoing eugenic language about desirable and undesirable mothers and children.
Notes
[i] Robin Jacboson, “Characterizing Consent: Race, Citizenship, and the New Restrictionists.” Political Research Quarterly 59.4 (2006), 648.
[ii] Ibid., 645.
[iii] Leisy J. Abrego and Cecilia Menjívar, “Immigrant Latina Mothers as Targets of Legal Violence.” International Journal of Sociology of the Family 37.1, Policing Motherhood (2011), 12.
[iv] Jacboson, 650.
[v] Ibid., 653.
[vi] Ibid., 648.
[vii] Ana Elizabeth Rojas, “Some Children Left Behind: Families in the Age of Deportation.” Boom: A Journal of California 2.3 (2012), 82.
[viii] Abrego and Menjívar, 9.
[ix] Angela Hooton and Silvia Henriquez, “Immigrant Rights Are Women’s Rights,” Off Our Backs 36.4 (2006), 38.
[x] Matt Sheehan, “Born In The USA: Why Chinese ‘Birth Tourism’ Is Booming In California.” The Huffington Post, May 14, 2015.
[xi] Susan Berfield, “Chinese Maternity Tourists and the Business of Being Born American.” Bloomberg, May 12, 2015.
[xii] Abrego and Menjívar, 29.
[xiii] Ibid., 31.
[xiv] Ibid., 29.
[xv] Lisa Sun-Hee Park, “Criminalizing Immigrant Mothers: Public Charge, Health Care, and Welfare Reform.” International Journal of Sociology of the Family 37.1, Policing Motherhood (2011), 31.
[xvi] Park, 32.
(Cover image courtesy of Daryl Cagle, Cagle.com).