Tina’s Teens Home Without Adult Supervision: Tina Brown’s youthful webworkers, trying to come up with a feature riffing off the Republican debate, have produced a slideshow of “anchor babies.” The only problem is that, embarrassingly, they missed the part in the definition of an “anchor baby” (including the one they themselves cite) where it notes that an “anchor baby” is the child of illegal immigrants born on American soil (the idea being that having an American citizen child anchors the entire otherwise-illegal family by insulating them from deportation).
Is even one of the celebrities offered by Daily Beast as “anchor babies” an anchor baby? I doubt it. If Gov. Nikki Haley’s immigrant parents or Colin Powell’s immigrant parents were illegals, I think we would know by now. Same for Olympia Snowe, Joan Rivers (“Russian parents”), Michelle Kwan, and Larry King. … P.S.: Note that this is the classic insulated New York liberal mistake: Assuming those Republicans out there in the rest of America–the ones who rail against anchor babies, etc.–are so crazy and dumb we can mock them without even thinking. …
For full Conflict of Interest Disclosure, see this previous post. I would add that I’m an “anchor baby” under the wacky TinaBeast definition. (Both my parents were legal immigrants.) …