On a side note, what’s the status of parents of so-called “anchor babies”? How worried should they be amid all the present hoopla? Because I know an Indian couple here in Hawaii who I’m pretty sure had their son here just to be able to stay.
Are you serious? Let’s look at the sentence as I actually wrote it, not the way you clipped it.
[QUOTE=Johnny Ace]
I know it’s agreed that the vetting system needs fixing, but not in terms of legal immigration, rather to prevent terrorists from entering the country.
[/QUOTE]
And then let’s go back to reading comprehension class. Actually, you go ahead, I don’t need it.
Or try to misquote someone that will let you get away with it.
They never had any status, and that hasn’t changed. U.S. citizen children need to be 21 years old to petition for their parents. Minor U.S. citizen children can be a positive discretionary factor in deportation proceedings in some circumstances.
Moderating
Treis, you are out of line.
From the SDMB rules:
[quote=“C_K_Dexter_Haven, post:11, topic:369395”]
Text inside
[QUOTE]
tags is sacrosanct. Normal editorial rules apply: that is, you may indicate omitted portions of a quote by the use of ellipses “…” and you may add text to clarify a word using square brackets (e.g., “her [the sister’s] friend”), but you may **not ** add editorial comments or edit a quote so as to change the substantive meaning; nor may you substitute text such as “some blather” or “more nonsense” inside the
You not only truncated the quote without ellipses to alter its meaning, you modified the quote header to eliminate the automatic link to the post quoted making it appear that two quotes were from the same post…
This is a Warning to refrain from such behavior.
[ /Moderating ]
That’s what I thought. The couple I mentioned live in our condominium complex. We’ve talked to them a bit, but they prefer to keep to themselves for the most part. They’re from India and Hindu, but we’ve discovered a lot of residents here assume they’re Muslim from West Asia. The wife stays home, no idea what the husband does, but I have no reason to think it’s anything illegal. The kid is eight, so it will be awhile before he can petition for his parents. Assuming he ever can, as the kid seems to have some serious mental problems.
But what happens to a child in cases where both parents are deported? Does the child, being a minor, have to go with them even though he or she is born an American, to be let back into the country upon adulthood? Surely the kid would not become a ward of the state?
AFAIK, at that point, it’s a family decision, not an immigration law issue (at least at the US end). Maybe they take the child with them, maybe they don’t.
Well, hopefully it won’t come to that. It just got me to thinking about anchor babies, then this thread popped up.
Anchor babies are a myth, they don’t confer the parents any status.
Normally the kid goes with the parents. Sometimes if there are other family members in the U.S. legally, the kid stays with them. I suppose if the kid were 17 years old or something, and about to go to college, they’d find a way for the kid to stay. But no, children do not become wards of the state merely because their parents were deported.
Also, these children are a huge issue for their receiving countries, which are sometimes ill-equipped to deal with them.
But if the parents are deported, and leave their child here, hen that child, an american citizen, would become a ward of the state, right?
Or are they forced to take the kid with them?
If I was being deported to some war torn area, or really just about any third world country, I would think that my kid would be better as an orphan in the US than having two parents back home.
Well, yeah, if the kid is abandoned in the US the kid would be put into foster care… which is no picnic.
It’s not what you’re describing, but some women overseas will travel to the US so their children are born in the US and have US citizenship. Sometimes they do this so the children can attend school or university in the US.
Still better than Syria, right?
If the United States were to implement a policy like this I think it would essentially put a stop to the whole anchor baby issue. Seems like a reasonable idea to me.
To be fair, I did the same thing when I quoted myself, copy/pasting my quote and inserting QUOTE and /QUOTE without the post reference #…I was being lazy. 
Except changing this in the US would, I think, require a constitutional amendment and that’s not easily done.
Of course, they then have the problem that they have entire groups of the population of people who are not citizens of any country at all.
I can’t think of how that could cause any problems.
And the “birth tourism” I talked about isn’t something being done by the poor. Usually, these people are middle- or upper-class (rich, in other words). They’re really unlikely to be a burden on the state.
I don’t follow. The child would acquire the citizenship of their parents. Here’s how it works for babies of American citizens who were born outside of the country.