American Children are NOT Anchors.

Anchor Babies  American Children

12/12/11

Mike J. Quinn- Author

southoftheborderbook.com/wordpress

To Fox News and Bob Dane, spokesman for F.A.I.R.

There are few terms that engender more anger than racial ones. When spoken aloud, they fan the flames of the already bitter, disparage the character of whom they are directed towards, and enrage those who listen and do not approve. When spoken to one’s self, they are like cancer to the soul. When adults say them about children, it is  utterly without honor or defense.

Bigots are people with a chronic personality disorder. They do not like something about a class of people that is different from them. Like alcoholics, they seek out each other’s company so they can feel normal while indulging themselves in their particular brand of self-destructive behavior.  They rationalize that if other people feel the same way, then they must be right.

People who use the term Anchor Babies are no different. The term serves a distorted purpose for those who use it, and a dictionary was going to add credibility to the term by adding it to their list of new phrases. Unfortunately the widespread use of the term this past year hinted at it’s legitimacy, but when inspected more closely, a dark morality emerges.

When using this term, people are de-humanizing young, innocent children and categorizing them as an undesirable object, much in the same way other races have been subjected to. With Anchor Babies, it is children we are picking on. How insensitive can we as human beings become? Much more, I’m afraid.

The term came about when ignorant and hateful people tried to claim that parents of children born in the United States are using their children to gain access to citizenship for them and the rest of their family. The problem is there is not a single fact to back that assumption up, but there are hundreds of thousands of parents who have been deported while their children stayed behind. And it gets worse.

According to a recent study done by the Applied Research Center there are over five thousand examples of American citizen children being put in foster care after deporting their parents. Now I ask you, is there anything more de-humanizing than to distribute children like so much junk left behind after someone has suddenly left the country?

Luckily few of us ever have to experience the tragedy of separating a child from their parents first-hand. We all benefit from the perspective of distance. The lack of pictures and sound makes it all seem like it never really happened, while reducing the children to mere statistics on a piece of paper to be filed under Miscellaneous. The hate-mongers meanwhile are free to pick on children all they like.

Our legal system seems to be able to clean up a mess just as quickly as it’s made,and once you deport the parents, the children don’t speak up for themselves, so few people will ever hear about it.

These children are not anchors, and they are not furniture or cars or used clothing —they are children— American children. They are citizens of this country and because of their age they need to be treated with more care than an adult. They don’t understand how things work or what their options are, or even how to take care of their own basic necessities. These innocent children rely on adults to do that for them, and we are sadly letting them down in the most egregious way possible. Sure we are taking care of their immediate physical needs, and so it may appear on the outside that we are taking great care of them, but can we see inside their hearts and minds to measure and catalogue the emotional damage we have inflicted upon them when we crushed their worlds and cast them into a new and completely foreign one? Have we as a nation lost the ability to empathize with children? Have we completely forgotten that to a child, a family unit is their world?

Many people will tell you that their whole lives changed when their parents got divorced, and they only left one parent behind– and even then there was visitation. Can you then imagine what it would have been like to have nothing of your old life to cling to for comfort and security when all the world stopped making sense?

So remember, Bob Dane, and Fox News Inc. the next time you go to use this phrase, or hear someone else say it, that these are not things, they are children– American children, who got their citizenship the same way you and I did. Let us not emotionally devastate them, especially in the name of Law or Country, for there can never be a right way– or an American way– to abuse a child.

We should stop this behavior immediately on the grounds of it being cruel and inhumane punishment. We need to figure out a less harmful way to do things.  If we think ourselves to be a great nation, then we should damn well be able to do much better than this.

For the entire report by the Applied Research center see  http://bit.ly/vdPhQr