Texas Insider Report: HOUSTON Texas A small row of connected town houses concealed a well-organized and very profitable maternity tourism" operation in San Gabriel California. Building inspectors and police officers arrived on location after receiving multiple noise complaints and reports of a lot of pregnant women coming and going. In the kitchen of one of these homes was a row of clear bassinets holding several infants with a woman attending to them.
Women from around the world travel to the U.S. in the final days of their pregnancy to give birth to American" babies some traveling from as far as China Turkey South Korea and other countries to take advantage of automatic American citizenship. There were so many women in these anchor baby motels that an exact number of people living there could not be determined.
Upon interviewing these women city social workers discovered that they had paid grand sums for the chance to deliver their babies within the borders of the United States after hearing about the opportunity to do so by companies in their home countries.
Often these baby stay" packages arrange for doctors insurance and postpartum care. Some even offer a free stroller.
Recently members of Congress have questioned the constitutionality of the grant of automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. whose parents are illegal aliens and who can then sponsor their parents for permanent residency as citizens of the United States.
The problem with the San Gabriel makeshift maternity ward is that most of the women were here LEGALLY possessing valid tourist visas.
Any reading of the plain language of the statute coupled with the pertinent legislative commentary reveals that a child born to persons present in the United States but with legal fealty to a foreign power cannot logically or legally benefit from the boon of citizenship when their parents are by very definition aliens to the extent and quality" of that most desirable status.
Can the fountain of liberty send forth the sweet water of citizenship at the same place as the bitter water of unlawful or fraudulent entry?
Speaking to the New York Times Angela Maria Kelley the vice president for immigration policy and advocacy at the Center for American Progress a liberal-leaning research organization said:
If this is something that was really widespread and happening all over you would have expected it to really have revealed itself. I think it deserves a lot more study and a lot more attention. But to say that you want to change the Constitution because of this feels like killing a fly with an Uzi.
Perhaps unwittingly Ms. Kelley is correct in her evaluation of the constitutional implications of the anchor baby issue:
We do not need to change the Constitution we simply need to correctly interpret and consistently enforce the citizenship provisions that are already part of that document.
