this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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I loathe Trump, but this always struck me as a strange law to still have this day and age.
When records were hard to maintain and uncertainty wasn't justification for kicking people out of the country, it made perfect sense.
What good is it for these days besides for exploitation? I couldn't imagine going to another country with my wife and then just because we had a baby there, that the baby is a citizen of that country.
I don't know what type of exploitation you are referring to.
I think that the general idea would be that a lot of people doing that probably want their child to have the option to come to the USA, primarily to earn a massive wage on the world scale. You and your wife most like earn a lot more money than most people in the world, and that is the case even for minimum wage workers too. Not at all saying minimum wage workers have it good here, most states, you can't afford a two bedroom apartment on minimum wage and have to work more than one job. But if you're coming from some place very poor, that minimum wage salary can be a life changing amount of money for your family at home. Which is where the majority of children born in the US to non citizens come from, poor countries where their parents come to work. And those parents aren't and shouldn't be expected to delay starting a family and raising kids while they are working.
There is also the concept of birthplace tourism which would entail having a lot more money than crossing the border because you need to have a passport and to fly into the country and stay for long enough to give birth. People probably do this for a variety of reasons including political instability in their own countries. Although that child which is sometimes called an anchor baby pejoratively would have to at least file and possibly pay taxes to the US for the rest of their life depending on where and how they work, which would probably not be worth it to anyone, but rich people if they didn't intend to live in the US.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/23/1159072741/russians-argentina-birth-tourism-passports
Here is a recent example in another country