OPINION:
There’s nothing new about anchor babies. Only the nomenclature has changed. With hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens pouring across the border over the past decades, many of them are looking for an anchor to keep them in place in the new world. A 6-pound baby might do it.
In his book, “Mexico: Chaos On Our Doorstep,” Sol Sanders tells how nearly two decades ago the senior officials of Los Angeles medical services warned that prenatal extension clinics were swamped by growing numbers of Mexican illegal aliens surging across the border to take advantage of free and better services not available in Mexico. What woman wouldn’t take advantage of an opportunity to bequeath health and a good start in life for her baby? The expectant women of that innocent day nearly always returned to their homes, waiting for the time, when the child at 17 could under U.S. law choose his citizenship.
Like all the numbers about “undocumented immigrants,” as the illegals are called in the sanitized language of our day, the statistics on how many children are born of illegal migrant mothers, either those in permanent residence or “hospital-temporaries,” are notoriously vague and unreliable. The numbers will be exaggerated up or down, depending on who’s making an argument with them. Some estimates — and estimates are all they are — range upward to 300,000 annually. There’s widespread skepticism of the estimate (11 million or so) of the illegals now living in the shadows in the United States.
The vague and unreliable bookkeeping begins as soon the women arrive, even for those arriving with a valid visa. An arriving mother-to-be gets a stamp on her immigration papers at the immigration cubicle, told to report on a date certain, and the if and when becomes a question asked of the wind. Many, perhaps most, do not report. In years past, many arriving immigrants have not been from Mexico or Central America, but from Europe, the Middle East or Asia.
As soon as the immigrants arrive, they collide with Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid. Hospitals, some organized as nonprofits but gobbling up private practices at warp speed to pay for rising medical costs (and sometimes extravagant salaries for medical-care executives). Keeping the doors to the crowded Emergency Room open costs a lot of money.
One hospital in a small Virginia village of our acquaintance, for example, must keep a doctor and nurse on 24-hour standby which is rarely used except for the occasional traffic accident or heart attack at 3 o’clock in the morning, together with standby ambulance and first providers.
The real “transformation” of medical care will come abundantly clear with the arrival of a new president in January 2017. President Obama has talked with grandiloquent language of curing the nation’s long-term problems, but Obamacare, for all the noise made about it, has done nothing to lift the drag anchor, made of growing insurance premiums and soaring deductions miserably familiar to nearly everyone. Blaming the babies is popular, but the problem lies beyond those pink and blue bassinets.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.