President Trump says he is “very seriously” looking at ending the current policy of birthright citizenship in the United States, whereby hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born children to illegal aliens — often referred to as “anchor babies” — are rewarded with American citizenship every year.
While speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Trump said his administration was reviewing an executive order to end the “ridiculous” birthright citizenship policy.
“We’re looking at that very seriously — birthright citizenship. Where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby, congratulations the baby is now a U.S. citizen,” Trump said. “We’re looking at it very, very seriously.”
“We are looking at birthright citizenship very seriously,” Trump continued. “It’s, frankly, ridiculous.”
Nearly a year ago, Trump promised that he was readying an executive order to end birthright citizenship, but the issue has been stalled since October 2018. To date, the U.S. Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled that the children of illegal aliens must be granted birthright citizenship, and many legal scholars dispute the idea.
The children of illegal aliens, after being granted birthright citizenship, are able to anchor their illegal alien and non-citizen parents in the U.S. and eventually are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country through the legal immigration process known as “chain migration.”
Today, there are at least 4.5 million anchor babies in the U.S., exceeding the annual roughly four million American babies born every year and costing American taxpayers about $2.4 billion every year to subsidize hospital costs. Every year, about 300,000 anchor babies are born in the country and as of June, there has been an average of about 124,000 anchor babies already born this year.
The sanctuary state of California is home to at least 1.2 million anchor babies under the age of 18, as Breitbart News reported. This is roughly twice the total population of Wyoming. The total of anchor babies under the age of 18 in ten U.S. states is more than four times the population of Boston, Massachusetts.
In total, there are now an unprecedented 62 million immigrants and their U.S.-born children living across the country, as Breitbart News has previously reported. As of 2017, there were 17.1 million U.S.-born minor children of immigrants in the country.
The U.S. is nearly alone in granting birthright citizenship to the children of foreign nationals and, specifically, illegal aliens. For example, the U.S. and Canada are the only two developed nations with birthright citizenship. On the other hand, countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Italy, and Germany all have either outlawed birthright citizenship or never had such a policy.
Most recently, Breitbart News reported how pregnant migrant women are waiting in shelters in Mexico with the hope that they will be granted asylum in the U.S. to secure American citizenship for their children.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.