Daira García wakes up at 5.50am. She takes out her dog, then tries to eat some breakfast before boarding the bus that gets her to school by 7.26 in the morning.
After class, she heads back home, where her parents, Silvia and Jorge, watch Noticiero and sip mate (she sometimes tries the drink as well but admits she’s never quite gotten used to it). They eat something, talk. When Daira goes off to finish her homework, she forgoes the desk in her room to curl up in her parents’ bed.
“It’s more comfy,” she quips.
Daira, 17, has a fairly standard routine for an American teenager: school, homework, family time. But unlike most kids, the schedule she’s come to rely on each day could easily be disrupted at any point.
Silvia and Jorge traveled from Argentina to the United States as 2001 became 2002, and with a new year came their new life in an unknown country. Daira’s big brother was just an infant then; now a college student, he doesn’t even really remember the place where he was born. And yet he’s only shielded from deportation because of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), an Obama-era program the Trump administration has been trying to end for years. Silvia and Jorge, meanwhile, have no protection and could be picked up by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at any time.
Daira begins to cry just thinking about it.
“We’ve never had a plan for it if it happened,” Silvia says in Spanish. “Maybe we don’t give much thought to that because we think it’s healthier.”
An estimated 4.1 million US-citizen children lived with at least one undocumented parent in recent years, according to the Migration Policy Institute. They’re kids who anti-immigrant groups disparage as “anchor babies”, a derogatory term that insinuates these children are little more than pawns used by their immigrant parents to get a foothold in the US and eventually become citizens themselves.
It’s a narrative trope that completely misrepresents the harsh realities of America’s current immigration laws, as well as just the natural progression of life, experts suggest.
“People have this notion that you have a child in the United States, now you’re a citizen. It’s what people think because it’s the easy way to explain it. So it’s an easy way to make up a myth,” said David Leopold, an immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
It’s true that children born on US soil have been granted citizenship through the 14th amendment to the US constitution, and that a landmark supreme court decision set the precedent for that right to be extended to almost all children of foreigners. But Americans can’t just immediately safeguard their family members from deportation. In fact, a US citizen must be 21 years old before they can sponsor their parents for a green card. They also must be able to financially support their parents.
Now the Trump administration’s new public charge rule targeting low-income immigrants is adding yet another burden.
Parents who were not inspected and admitted into the US face even more obstacles to changing their immigration status: with limited exceptions, they have to go abroad as part of the legalization process and then often aren’t allowed back into the US for 10 years.
Even if parents do get a green card, they have a five-year holding period before they can finally apply for naturalization.
In the end, the so-called “anchor baby” pathway to citizenship is at least a 26-year endeavor, even for those who entered the US legally.
“It’s ludicrous to think that that’s some sort of a tactic that people use to come here, get citizenship, ’cause it just isn’t true,” said Leopold. “It’s a myth, and it’s a specious talking point.”
A talking point that’s popular among anti-immigrant groups, pundits and the Republican party.
The Republican senator Lindsey Graham has called birthright citizenship “a mistake” and argued that immigrants come to the US to “drop a child”. Graham’s former colleague the California congressman Duncan Hunter even advocated for deporting the US-citizen children of undocumented immigrants. Congressman Steve King has continually introduced legislation challenging these kids’ right to citizenship.
When Donald Trump launched his campaign for the 2016 presidential election, his signature policy agenda around immigration often leaned into the “anchor baby” fallacy. Part of his platform included ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, and Trump called for deporting such families.
Since becoming commander-in-chief, Trump has continued to hint at an impending crackdown on birthright citizenship, and in January, the administration made it more difficult for pregnant people to get short-term visas. Meanwhile, officials at the border aren’t allowing pregnant asylum seekers to attend their court hearings, and an attorney said it was so they wouldn’t give birth to a US citizen, KPBS reported.
As the 2020 presidential election heats up, Trump will probably use birthright citizenship to rile his supporters, Leopold suggested.
“It’s red meat for the Trump base,” he said.
During the last election, Trump repeated the words “anchor baby” gratuitously on the campaign trail, giving the phrase even more air. When a reporter pointed out that the term was hurtful and offensive, Trump rebuffed him: “You mean it’s not politically correct? And yet everybody uses it.”
But just two decades ago, no one used it – at least not publicly. In the book Anchor Babies and the Challenge of Birthright Citizenship, the anthropologist Leo Chavez tracked the term’s appearance in both coasts’ papers of record, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. “Anchor babies” never cropped up until the early 2000s.
“That practice of targeting people who really are members of your society historically and legally and marking them as different allows you to do incredibly awful things to them,” Chavez said. They suffered psychological terror caused by the same fears that their families experienced, he said.
For 17 years, Daira hasn’t been able to keep Silvia and Jorge safe just by being a US citizen. Nor did they ever expect that she would.
“It was never the idea to come to the US to have a child,” Silvia said. After she, Jorge, and their one-year-old son arrived in Long Island, she tried to get birth control, but the complicated US medical system delayed that process. In the meantime, life happened.
“When I became pregnant with her,” Silvia said, “at first the world fell apart for me, because we were in another country where the situation wasn’t the best.”
The family can laugh about it now, maybe because they’ve hustled and come out on the other side. It wasn’t easy. In a corner of the country known for abnormally high rents, they’ve spent practically all their lives in other people’s basements. Silvia worked night shifts at odd jobs. When Jorge finally found work that wasn’t just temporary, he tended to hold on to the role for years.
These days, Daira takes art classes and wants to study illustration. Silvia is “retired to march”, she jokes; after Trump rescinded Daca and the courts took up the issue, she became an activist fighting to protect young people like her son. Jorge just got his driver’s license after successfully advocating on the frontlines for all New Yorkers’ rights to drive legally regardless of their immigration status. Daira’s happy about that; it’s “more secure”, she says.
“They’re doing all the positive things that we think are strong American values that we would really like to have here, but we don’t give them the opportunity to put that into practice,” said Chavez. “What we do is take their kids and call them names.”
