Problem With Immigration: Anchor Babies & Illegals

From The New York Times: On a frigid morning in February, I met with Linda Arnold inside a small brick storefront in El Paso. “Unless you are right here, I don’t think you can get how intertwined this community is,” Arnold told me. A midwife with frosted blond hair who favors jangly jewelry, Arnold was running a small business called the Casa de Nacimiento, catering to a specific subset of border-straddlers. At that moment, sweating through labor, were three women who had come over the bridges from Juárez with legal visas. The distance, about a mile and a half from the Rio Grande, was geographically negligible but enormously consequential. Giving birth here would deliver their children a precious advantage: it would make them Americans.
Arnold isn’t an immigration zealot, or even an ideological liberal, despite the hippie-ish connotations of her profession. “We’re not going to sit around here and chant,” she said as we spoke in her office, which contained a sculpture of a womb and a portrait of her own son, a soldier in uniform. “This is a business, not a commune.” What Arnold was offering for sale at Casa de Nacimiento, for $695, was a future untroubled by the border’s impediments. Any child born at Arnold’s birth center would possess American citizenship, courtesy of the 14th Amendment, and with it the ability to cross freely back and forth.
It is El Paso’s way to make the most of the border’s inequities. Arnold moved to town in 1985 with an impassioned commitment to natural childbirth and an entrepreneur’s hunch about an untapped market. Mexican women had a long tradition of crossing the border to give birth, and Arnold soon made herself one of the busiest midwives in the state. Back when she started, getting over the border was as simple as wading across the Rio Grande or paying a ferryman a dollar for a tow on an inner tube. “They would come in with their jeans still wet,” she said.
Though Arnold’s discipline is more popular than it used to be, it’s still not fully accepted by the American medical establishment, and many midwives in training find it difficult to gain experience. “The volume’s not there,” Arnold said. El Paso, with its large, willing, cash-paying clientele, made an ideal destination for students. Though heightened security has put an end to the days of wet jeans, it is relatively easy for a resident of Juárez to obtain a U.S. border-crossing card, which permits short trips for social visits or shopping, and there is nothing illegal about crossing while pregnant — at least for now.
While American nationality has always been a desirable asset in Juárez, it has become much more valuable — sometimes a matter of life and death — since the drug violence erupted in earnest three years ago. The children delivered at Casa de Nacimiento on the day we met would eventually be able to attend better schools, find better jobs and, if necessary, seek haven. I met a couple named Graciela and Milo, who brought their 2-week-old daughter, Jennifer, to Arnold’s birth center for a postpartum checkup. The parents were Mexican citizens. (For reasons of privacy, the center insisted that their last names not be used.) Their first two children were born in their home country, but when it came time to have this one, they decided to cross over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/magazine/life-on-the-line-between-el-paso-and-juarez.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1
Anchor babies and illegals are destroying cities like Las Vegas, Los Angeles and others. The cost educating illegals, keeping them healthy and dealing with the crime illegals and anchor babies bring are darn near bankrupting communities. No, the illegals do not pay enough taxes to offset their expenses, if the illegals pay taxes at all.
And yet, Harry Reid and the Democrats want to make illegals citizens through the Dream Act. Their priorities are in the wrong place. First, they need to stop illegals from coming into this country and throw those out who are breaking laws or are seeking public assistance.
Then you need to find a way to cut down on anchor babies. How, I am not sure, but because the Supreme Court decided it was ok for anchor babies, maybe they can become the one to stop the business of the anchor babies and it is a business.
If nothing is done, cities like Las Vegas are going to end up looking like Juarez, Mexico. We're not there yet, but we are slowly closing in.