WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – Since the Supreme Court last month upheld the constitutionality of the Lawful Citizenship Act, there has been considerable speculation as to which group of illegal immigrants would be the first to be deported.
As is known, the Act specified that the constitutional provision that children born in the United States automatically become citizens does not apply to children of parents who are in the country without a valid visa. Such children have become known as “anchor babies” in US politics.
Legal scholars have pointed out certain inescapable consequences of the new law. If a child was an illegal immigrant as the result of being born to parents who were illegal immigrants, that illegality remains throughout his/her life unless the child elects to leave the country and, from abroad, apply for an immigrant visa and then citizenship. Few if any children born illegally in the United States are believed to have done this.
But since an anchor baby remains always an illegal immigrant, it follows that his/her children are also illegal immigrants. And those children’s children also, yea, verily unto the seventh generation. Or maybe longer, if anyone can keep track.
The first group of anchor baby descendants to be deported, Rooters learned yesterday from an anonymous government source, will be Irish.
The decision involved no national or ethnic prejudice, the source insisted. It was based entirely on the fact that a large proportion of these illegal immigrants arrived over a short period (late 1840s to 1850s), making it less of a task to track down their descendants. Others will follow, as resources become available.
The source anticipated “the specious arguments of well-paid liberal lawyers” that these 19th century immigrants were not illegal. “That’s nonsense. None of them even had passports, let alone visas,” he pointed out. “They were allowed in by soft-hearted officials, or greedy ones who had taken bribes from employers who liked the cheap labor. Those kinds of violations don’t make the immigrants legal.
“These were economic migrants, not refugees,” he continued. “They weren’t being persecuted. They were just seeking economic improvement: food and stuff like that.”
Government officials are poring over census returns to find likely Irish-origin candidates for deportation. No seriously troubling legal challenges are anticipated, because the government will argue that prospective plaintiffs have no standing to sue since they are not citizens. “The Supreme Court has often jumped over logical hurdles bigger than that,” our source pointed out.
However, there may still be some knotty problems to overcome, depending on the geographical origin of the original Irish anchor babies: in the mid-19th century, Ireland had not yet been divided into two. Determining whether anchor descendants owe more of their ancestry to the Irish Republic or to Northern Ireland could get complicated.
Who’s next? Rooters is trying to find out, but we don’t know yet. The only people who don’t seem to be very worried are American Indians.
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