(iStock)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has focused much of his White House bid on border security, asserting immigrants are entering the United States at a “record pace” and having “anchor babies” to stay on American soil. Evidence supports neither of those points.
The estimated number of unauthorized immigrants here hasn’t budged since 2009 (and has actually dropped since 2007). Giving birth, meanwhile, doesn't create a fast-track to citizenship. Over the last seven years, the country has deported more than a half-million parentsof American kids.
But throughout his campaign, Trump has suggested the law creates incentives for foreigners to give birth in U.S. hospitals. “Someone could be pregnant for nine months, come across the border, have the baby, and now it’s ours and we have to take care of that baby forever,” he said last year in Dallas.
In a 2015 interview with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, Trump argued that so-called “anchor babies,” a term widely viewed as derogatory, shouldn't receive legal protection. “We have to start a process where we take back our country,” he said. “Our country is going to hell.”
What the Republican nominee sees as an urgent problem, though, is actually on the decline. About 275,000 babies were born to unauthorized parents here in 2014, or about 7 percent of the 4 million U.S. births that year, according to an analysis of the latest data from the Pew Research Center. That’s a drop from 295,000 in 2013 and a plummet from 330,000 in 2009.
(Courtesy of the Pew Research Center)
The Constitution's 14th Amendment grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States. In recent years, some Republican politicians, including Trump and Jeb Bush, have challenged the 148-year-old rule, arguing it attracts illegal immigration. (Fifty-seven percent of Americans disagree with that idea, Pew found, while 39 percent favored ending the birthright measure.)
While doctors in border towns confirm that some women come to the United States to give birth in a more stable environment, the story of immigrant fertility is more complicated than what any political rhetoric covers. Roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, constituting 4 percent of the population.
They “accounted for a higher share of births because the immigrant population overall (lawful and unauthorized) includes a higher share of women in their childbearing years,” the Pew authors wrote, “and hashigher birthrates than the overall U.S. population.”
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