It sounds like a way for illegal immigrants to get a foothold in the United States: Pregnant women from Mexico and other countries can come to the U.S. to deliver their babies. Voila! Under the 14th Amendment, the babies are instant citizens!
That's become a popular talking point for critics of illegal immigration, who have dubbed the children "anchor babies." The implication often is that the baby U.S. citizens act as an anchor that that helps parents and other relatives obtain citizenship and other benefits.
Several Republican senators, including Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., John McCain, R-Ariz., Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have called for hearings on whether the 14th Amendment, which was adopted in 1868, needs to be rewritten to curb automatic "birthright citizenship."
The most prominent voice pushing that concept is Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who proposed amending the Constitution to make clear that babies born in the U.S. do not automatically receive American citizenship.
In a July 28, 2010, interview on Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Graham said that "there's another problem we have in this nation that I think is novel and needs to be fixed. If you come across the border illegally and you have a child in America, automatically, that child becomes an American citizen. Under the 14th Amendment, three court cases says there's a constitutional right to that. I would like to deal with the 12 million (illegal immigrants) firmly and fairly. You can't stay here on your own terms. You have to learn English. You have to pay fines. You have to get in the back of the line if you want to be a citizen. But I may introduce a constitutional amendment that changes the rules if you have a child here. Birthright citizenship, I think, is a mistake, that we should change our Constitution and say if you come here illegally and you have a child, that child's automatically not a citizen."
Later in the interview, Van Susteren asked Graham, "How realistic is it that you will introduce a constitutional amendment?"
Graham replied that he had to because "people come here to have babies. They come here to drop a child. It's called 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons."
In a later interview with Van Susteren on Aug. 3, Graham once again referred to a "problem where thousands of people are coming across the Arizona-Texas border for the express purpose of having a child in an American hospital so that child will become an American citizen, and they broke the law to get there."
We've dealt with one aspect of this issue before, when we checked a claim by Fox host Glenn Beck that "we're the only country in the world" that offers birthright citizenship. (We found that 33 others do, so we rated Beck's statement False.)
This time, we were curious about Graham's statement that "people come here to have babies. They come here to drop a child." He portrays it as such a big phenomenon that it warrants changing the U.S. Constitution. But is the problem as big as he suggests?
Limited benefits
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.
However, having a citizen child can produce some short-term benefits, said Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute. Pregnant women and nursing mothers could be eligible for certain benefits under the Women-Infants-Children (WIC) program, which provides food and nutrition vouchers, and their children could enroll in Medicaid, although the undocumented parents could not. Having a child can also help an undocumented parent qualify for relief from deportation, but only 4,000 unauthorized immigrants can receive such status per year, and the alien has to have been in the U.S. for at least 10 years. That means very long odds, Rosenblum said.
Most of the benefits of citizenship accrue over the much longer term. The child will be able to work here legally once he or she is old enough, said Roberto Suro, a communications and journalism professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in Hispanic issues, and when they're ready for college, they'll qualify for in-state tuition at most public colleges. "It is a hell of a lot of deferred gratification at best," he said.
Mixed evidence
When we contacted Graham's staff, they could not provide any specific data on mothers who "drop and leave." But they sent us several news accounts about the large number of undocumented immigrants who give birth to children in the United States.
Graham is right on that point. According to a report by the Pew Hispanic Center, a think tank that has done extensive research on immigration policy, 3.8 million undocumented immigrants have at least one child who is a citizen. "Most children of unauthorized immigrants -- 73 percent in 2008 -- are U.S. citizens by birth," the center says. That's up from 63 percent in 2003.
These statistics suggest not only that the number is large, but is also growing.
To offer a concrete example, we found a 2006 article from the Dallas Morning News about Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, a safety-net facility for poor residents. As many of 70 percent of the roughly 16,000 women giving birth annually at the hospital were immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally, according to one survey cited in the story.