I admit it: I'm the mother of an anchor baby. When they come to take me away in the middle of the night, remember I 'fessed up here.
Anchor babies – a grotesque term that conjures up images of fat toddlers lodging in the silt at the bottom of the Rio Grande – are a very hot topic in the United States. They're the children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. Thanks to the 14th amendment of the Constitution, any child born in the U.S. is automatically given American citizenship, which is still the Willy Wonka gold ticket in the great migration lottery.
My own anchor baby was born when we were living in Los Angeles. I wasn't there illegally but on the sufferance of the horribly named "spouse visa." I wasn't permitted to work or pay taxes, but let me tell you I abused the state of California: used its roads, pushed my chubby son on its swings and was grateful when the government sent me a video in which Rob Reiner told me how to be a good parent.
But no one ever accused me of being an anchor mother, perhaps because I was a lazy Italian-Canadian rather than a hard-working but undocumented Latina. I did see lots of those women, however. They were the ones who had come to L.A. to look after someone else's children, scrape the merdons out of their $2,000 toilets and pick the arugula that sat on their lunch plates. (Unless it had been defiled by salad dressing, in which case: Get thee behind me, arugula.)
The scourge of immigration was the subject of much hollering at this week's Republican hopefuls debate, in which the candidates tried to out-Rambo each other. Mitt Romney and Rick Perry bickered over who'd been softest on "illegals," though they looked less like duelling sheriffs than two frat boys arguing over who forgot to invite the hotties of Phi Sigma Sigma to their keg party. Michele Bachmann, trying to claw her way back into the race, said: "There are a lot of Americans that would like us to deal with this issue of anchor babies legislatively."
A few days earlier, Herman Cain had talked about building an electrified fence along the U.S.-Mexican border (perhaps a giant catapult was too expensive to fit into his 9-9-9 plan). He now claims it was a joke – because, really, nothing says party like mass electrocution!
You wonder if any of them have looked into the reports coming out of Alabama, which is enacting some of the toughest anti-migrant laws in the U.S., and where the farmers are staring at crops that no native-born American wants to pick. Most of their Hispanic workers have fled, and no one else wants to do the badly paid, back-breaking work. "You can't get legal workers," a blueberry farmer named Connie Horner told The Associated Press. "They last a day or two, literally." She's bought a machine to pick her blueberries.
Of course, it's not only Republican politicians who prefer to point the finger at job thieves with foreign accents (while ignoring the larceny of those who speak with the same accent.) In Britain, where I live now, Prime Minister David Cameron has spent the past year playing to his constituents with tough anti-immigrant talk.
This week, London Mayor Boris Johnson wondered why the Pret a Manger sandwich chain wasn't staffed with "native Londoners." (I imagine he failed to notice the shop's name.) Could it be that native Londoners don't like to stand on their feet all day, staring with shark eyes at some customer complaining there's not enough mayonnaise in the egg mayonnaise?
In my experience of living in this great city, there are certain jobs that native Londoners don't like to do, including working at convenience stores that stay open until all hours selling luridly coloured alcopops to local bon vivants. They also appear not to enjoy driving buses, mopping floors in hospitals and – most dangerous of all, on a nutcase-per-day ratio – working as parking wardens. Yet, these glamorous professions need fresh bodies all the time. There are permanent signs on the side of London buses begging for drivers – almost like that time America put out a call for huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The Daily Beast website has provided a mischievous list of "anchor babies," including Colin Powell, Renée Zellweger and Alex Rodriguez (well, they're the children of immigrants, anyway). Even Boris Johnson could be considered an anchor baby, since he was born in New York to British parents. Of course, no one calls him that. Have you seen the colour of his hair?