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7% Of Births In The US Are Anchor Babies

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Blake Neff Reporter
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Seven percent of births in the U.S. in 2014 were children born to illegal immigrants, also know as “anchor babies,” according to new data from Pew Research Center.

The U.S. had some four million births in 2014. Of those births, 247,000 were to women living in the U.S. illegally, according to Pew’s estimates. That’s 7 percent of the total, and 32 percent of all births to immigrant mothers.

Such children are often called “anchor babies” because U.S. law automatically confers citizenship on them. Having children who are U.S. citizens can serve as a barrier to deporting people who are otherwise in the U.S. illegally. Once the children become adults, they can also sponsor the legal immigration of foreign family members into the U.S.

The term is also applied to the children of women who specifically travel to the U.S. late in a pregnancy so that their child can be born in the U.S. and have automatic U.S. citizenship.

It has sometimes been considered a slur, with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush coming under attack for using it on the presidential campaign trail in 2015. (RELATED: Trump Shuts Down Reporter, Says He’ll Use ‘Anchor Baby’)

Pew’s report noted that immigrant mothers are the main factor propping up America’s birthrate. While births to native women have fallen from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.1 million today, births to foreign-born women have exploded from 270,000 to roughly 900,000. Whether legal or illegal, foreign-born women have a substantially higher fertility rate than U.S. natives.

The largest nation of origin for foreign mothers is Mexico; 7 percent of all U.S. births are to mothers born in Mexico.

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