This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Asian American advocacy groups are criticizing Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush after he singled them out in reviving the controversial term “anchor babies”.

Bush told a conservative radio host last week that there needed to be better enforcement of women who come into the US to give birth – invoking the controversial term while doing so.

“Nothing about what I’ve said should be viewed as derogatory towards immigrants at all,” Bush later said, on Monday. “This is all how politics plays. And by the way, I think we need to take a step back and chill out a little bit as it relates to the political correctness that somehow you have to be scolded every time you say something.”



He added: “Frankly it’s more related to Asian people.”



The final comment prompted widespread condemnation from advocacy groups who believe it paints a reductive portrait of the immigration system in the US.



Erin Oshiro, senior staff attorney for immigration and immigrant rights at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said that any rhetoric that pits immigrants against each other distracts from reforms needed in the system.



“They are coming here for opportunities for their families, the same as immigrants have always done,” Oshiro said.



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The term “anchor babies” is used negatively to describe people who enter the US and have babies there so that their children have American citizenship and, as the stereotype presumes, so that they have an opportunity to gain citizenship as well.

Yet the process of having an “anchor baby” to gain citizenship could take decades. Parents must wait 21 years before their grown children can sponsor them for citizenship. And if they have been living in the US without documentation, which is common, they must return to their birth country to receive a visa or green card; by leaving, they are banned from re-entry for up to 10 years.

“It’s a really impractical long-term plan that has no guarantee,” Oshiro said. “I don’t think that’s why immigrants are coming here.”



Bush on Tuesday defended himself from earlier critics by saying that because he is married to a Mexican-American woman, he feels “bicultural” and therefore is sensitive to immigrant communities.

And he backpedaled on his comments about Asian immigrants, saying that it applied to a “very narrowcasted system of fraud” in which pregnant women come to the US to take advantage of birthright laws.

That “narrowcasted system” probably refers to a major federal crackdown on so-called “birth tourism” earlier this year that saw federal agents swarm a business that housed wealthy Chinese women who traveled to California to have American babies.

“It’s going to be really hard for me to be lectured to about the politics of immigration,” Bush said.



But the general sentiment in his initial comments had already done its damage.

Congresswoman Judy Chu, a Democrat from California and the first Chinese-American woman elected to the US Congress, said in a statement that using the “slur” of “anchor babies” distracts from actual problems in the immigration system.

“All that is accomplished through talk of anchor babies – be they from Latin America, Asia, Europe, or Africa – is to use xenophobic fears to further isolate immigrants,” Chu said. “It’s time for our country to return to a substantive discussion on immigration.”

Asian Pacific American Advocates national president Michael Kwan condemned Bush’s comments in a statement. “This faulty rhetoric makes millions of law-abiding Asians a target for anti-immigrant and xenophobic attitudes, which will help spread the myth that Asian Americans are somehow less American than white Americans,” he said.

The National Council of Asian Pacific Americans did the same, saying Bush’s comments were part of continued discrimination against the immigrant community. “We urge lawmakers to instead focus on developing humane legislative solutions to reform our broken immigration system,” the NCAPA said in a statement.

And fellow Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, whose comments about the immigration system were condemned by the Mexican government, said that Bush’s comments were “A mess!”