Things are finally starting to settle down, at least for the moment. President Trump’s path to election victory getting narrower and narrower (though if you get your news from most mainstream media, you’d think he had no path at all). The electors have now actually elected Joe Biden, and so finally, even without Trump’s concession, it is appropriate to call him “president-elect.” The COVID vaccine is being distributed and each day, more and more Americans are lining up for it. Although it doesn’t appear that our country is united on a whole lot nowadays, most of us would agree that we hope 2021 is much, much more like 2019 than like 2020. We long for the days of comparative peace of mind, being fairly confident that our election process is largely trustworthy, and even more importantly, walking around, getting together with our friends and family members, and returning to enjoying life in general without fear of contracting and spreading a dangerous virus.

We have become mired in a battle of ‘MAGA vs. Mask,’ and very little else seems to matter. And that’s exactly how some who want to see American society disrupted want things to be. If we take our eye off the ball, maybe we won’t notice all of the foul play a-brewin’.

Specifically, the perpetuation of anchor babies, i.e., children that are often intentionally conceived, and more often intentionally birthed, in the United States for the primary if not sole purpose of their establishing birthright U.S. citizenship and therefore serving as catalysts of chain migration – immigration benefits to their immediate family members, and exponentially to extended ones that otherwise would not have been available to them had it not been for that first “natural-born citizen” event.

Keep in mind, not all such cases deserve scorn. A baby that happens to be born to a foreign-born woman in the United States who is here on a legal nonimmigrant visa – she may be a student, visitor, or temporary worker, for example – will indeed enjoy the benefits of a U.S. citizen, including the ability to petition for its mother, father, and other family members to gain legal immigration status in the United States, including citizenship. Sometimes, such are serendipitous (to the beholder) results emerging from innocent, unplanned happenstance. The problem here is intentional anchor birth schemes, on an individual level and even worse when fueled by an organized effort to subvert the sovereignty and integrity of our immigration process.

I call to your attention the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), located in the Philippine Sea and roughly equidistant to China, Japan, and the Philippines. CNMI is a U.S. territory, and generally persons born there are U.S. citizens. Granted, CNMI is only one of several U.S. territories where that benefit applies, so why single it out? Back in 2009, shortly after Barack Obama became president, the Department of Homeland Security allowed citizens of China to enter CNMI without a visa. According to a December 3 article published in the Washington Times, the number of CNMI births by foreign women ballooned from about 10 per year before that policy to approximately 600 per year since its inception, about 95 percent being of Chinese descent. The dramatic 6000 percent rise has caused some members of Congress to speak out against “birthing loopholes” but nothing has been done about it. In fairness, Congress has been controlled by both Democrats and Republicans at various intervals and, as I pointed out in my 2017 book Stop Calling Them “Immigrants”, both parties have been guilty of ignoring the problem. As I have also said and written repeatedly over the past four years, it is no coincidence that despite having some culpability for the negative aspects of his own public image, it is no coincidence that President Trump has been so intensely vilified because, in defiance of the major party establishment duopoly, he has been more vocal about such immigration abuses than any president in the past hundred years.

The media is quick to douse the flames of this nationally vital issue by accusing the complainers of racism and xenophobia, claiming that the only reason people sound the alarm is because of a hateful and irrational aversion to persons of color. Do these accusers really believe that if women who flocked to CNMI to give birth to anchor babies were from Norway or Sweden that everyone would be perfectly fine with that practice?

The United States in many respects has grown to unmanageable proportions and we really need to gain control of the situation before things get worse. Surely any baby born into U.S. citizenship can grow up to become a wonderful person and an asset to our nation, but that’s not the point. Our laws are meant to be followed, not broken, and not bent in a manner that frustrates the very purpose of their promulgation.

One might wonder: why pick on the Northern Mariana islands? What about visaless travel directly into New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago? That’s a problem too. I have long argued against visaless travel as a rule; certainly not because of racism and xenophobia, but for the purposes of law and order.

The real question is: do U.S. lawmakers have a fundamental problem with anchor babies? The scary thing is, many do not. I applauded Joe Biden during the Democratic primary debates, because he was the only significant presidential candidate from that party to differ with the others in terms of immigration policy. But even Biden only went so far as to insist that illegal entry (which many anchor births are not) should remain a crime, but that’s a far cry from standing up to the aforesaid establishment duopoly that for a century has turned a blind eye to immigration exploitation.

Numerous centrist Democrats reassure me that Biden won’t take the country far left, but plans to govern from the sensible center. That is encouraging; but when it comes to certain aspects of immigration policies and procedures, the center hasn’t been particularly sensible in a long, long time.