Taiwanese woman may face hefty bill for US plane birth

news.yahoo.com

2 points·smaili··4 comments

Huh. My (mainland Chinese) wife told me about this story after reading about it in the Chinese press. I thought it was sensationalized a bit, but this article lines up with what she told me pretty well (though maybe that just means the AP is sourcing the Chinese press in its article).

Apparently a lot of better-off Chinese women travel to the US to have their children, though they don't stay there, so they're not technically "anchor babies." Still, given the prevalence that it happens, I'm surprised I've heard so little about it in the US press, especially given how the citizenship-at-birth issue has been debated recently. And apparently this particular woman's other children were also born in the US in the same manner…

"Anchor baby" is a mythical beast used to stir up xenophobia. Fears of yellow peril in the US died many decades ago, so pushing this incident serves no special purpose.

Instead, it's falls into the long history of people doing exactly the same thing. For example, the father of former New Mexico governor and one-time presidential candidate Bill Richardson "had a complex about not having been born in the United States" (quoting his son), so "[j]ust before Bill Richardson was born, his father sent his mother to California to give birth" (quoting Wikipedia).

> Fears of yellow peril in the US died many decades ago

It's not totally gone, it just morphs over the years.

What we have now is generic xenophobia. It's not "yellow peril" in any meaning of the historical sense.

There are no pogroms, where Asians have a "Chinaman's chance" of avoiding lynching. There is no "Asiatic Barred Zone" from which people could not immigrate. American women who marry an Asian alien do not lose US citizenship. People from India and Japan can become US citizens.

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