Although the term “anchor baby” has been around for only a couple of decades, the concept is several centuries old, believes writer Chauncey DeVega. In a Friday article for Salon, DeVega contended that the earliest American anchor babies were born to colonists, and that the modern term “cannot possibly be separated from the nightmare of white supremacy, of a democracy where human rights and citizenship were based on a person’s melanin count and parentage.”
DeVega further argued that a much broader racial agenda is at work: “Movement conservatives’ eager deployment of the ‘anchor baby’ meme — and their solution of revoking birthright citizenship through a rewrite of the Constitution– is in keeping with the Republican Party’s assault on the won-in-blood freedom of black and brown Americans. The ‘anchor baby’ talking point is yet more proof that the GOP is a radical and destructive political force, one that actively embraces white supremacy.”
From DeVega’s piece (bolding added):
The phrase [“anchor babies”] is like a zombie for American conservatives: It lingers, never dying, ready to reappear during the presidential election season as political red meat to feed the xenophobic and racially resentful Republican electorate…
…[T]he imagery of invading hordes of Spanish-speaking brown people — a group that conservatives imagine as a fundamental threat to “American values and culture” — is foundational to white identity politics in the post-civil right[s] era.
Indeed, in the Age of Obama, racism and conservatism are one and the same. And the Republican Party is addicted…
In America…where the color line determined one’s freedom, the language of “anchor baby” cannot possibly be separated from the nightmare of white supremacy, of a democracy where human rights and citizenship were based on a person’s melanin count and parentage…
…In reality, the people who would eventually become the first “Americans,” those white Europeans who, beginning in the 17th century, migrated to the colonies are the parents of this country’s first and true “anchor babies”…
…One of the United States’ most powerful myths is a belief that the nation was founded as a country “of immigrants.”
This is untrue. Like Australia, South Africa, and Israel, the United States was a colonial state made up of white settlers. The distinction between a “settler” society and one comprised of “immigrants” is very important. Immigrants move to a new space and then adopt the values of the people already living there. By contrast, settlers move to a new space, claim it as their own, and then impose their values and beliefs on the people who were already living there…
White colonists were determined to breed more “anchor babies” in order to develop and work the land they occupied in the “New World.” Between childbirth and colonization, the white population in the American colonies rose from only 250,000 in 1700 to 1.7 million by the end of 1770, an increase of 680 percent.
“Manifest Destiny,” one of America’s other founding mythologies, was contrived in order to justify the displacement of the First Nations already inhabiting the continent, and to encourage the establishment of white dominion over other parts of the world. It was, in effect, a declaration of the white “anchor baby” as national (and international) policy…
…[T]oday’s Republicans have amplified Manifest Destiny through their commitment to American militarism and never-ending war abroad, yearning for an American Christian Theocracy, and racism as electoral strategy...
Movement conservatives’ eager deployment of the “anchor baby” meme — and their solution of revoking birthright citizenship through a rewrite of the Constitution– is in keeping with the Republican Party’s assault on the won-in-blood freedom of black and brown Americans. The “anchor baby” talking point is yet more proof that the GOP is a radical and destructive political force, one that actively embraces white supremacy.
