Of ocurse I am going to take the opportunity to talk about the Hamas attack on Israel. First, I'd like to talk about my background, or baggage, regarding the country. I have lived in Israel, some years ago. This was not for religious reasons; I spent several months there working on a movie. During pre-production, weeks of location scouting and shooting the movie, I was all over the country, and spent a fair amount of time in the West Bank, where we also shot. This included a lot of places that normal tourists would not see, including predominantly Arab areas such as East Jerusalem, the Arab quarter of the old city, Ramla and the southern part of Jaffa, which is predominantly Arab. It also included heavily Orthodox areas like Mea Shearim. I dealt with Israeli Arabs, Palestinians and Bedouins. Here are a few things I believe I learned there: First of all, the Palestinians I knew were perfectly normal people with the same interest in living a safe, secure
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Originally, the term didn't indicate the immigration status of the parents. Indeed, the "anchor" referred to the American-born offspring of Vietnamese "boat people."
HOWEVER . . .
The ultra-reactionaries have turned its meaning to "American-born offspring of immigration law violators, especially those churned out for the purpose of keeping said violators in the United States so they can leech off taxpaying citizens."
As Drum points out, "If anchor babies are basically a myth, then the term is obviously a slur. There's no reason to make up this name for something that never (or very rarely) happens except as a way of demeaning a class of people and appealing to crude xenophobia. But if it does happen, then it makes sense to have a term for it. Otherwise you can't even talk about the subject sensibly."
Since (a) having an American-born child is not a defense against being deported, and (b) immigrants use public services at a lower rate than people born in the United States, the reactionaries' idea of "anchor babies" is a lie and myth; hence the use of the term is racist.