If there’s one crackdown Trump has taken seriously, it’s on illegal immigration. One could almost say that during his second term, the President has been making most headlines revolving around the issue, followed by the infamous tariffs. For MAGA minds and conservative consciences, there has been no better time than now to share just how they feel about immigration and a term that has risen from the dead is, anchor baby. This two-worded term is more than just a phrase, it’s an ideology mixed with an identity and a hint of indignation. In recent days, this term has largely been associated with Indian-origin entrepreneur, former Republican presidential candidate and conservative intellectual, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Nick Fuentes dubs Vivek Ramaswamy an ‘anchor baby’
Popular far-right activist, Nick Fuentes launched a racist attack on Ramaswamy after the Republican leader’s recent New York Times op-ed. “Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation,” wrote Ramaswamy in his op-ed. Fuentes took to X to share his thoughts on the same and wrote, “Reminder that Vivek Ramaswamy is an actual anchor baby, so everything he says can be completely disregarded. Foreigners who have no right to be here don’t get to lecture me about what it is to be American.”
What is an anchor baby?
According to Dictionary.com, ‘anchor baby’ is a term used to refer to a baby born to an undocumented mother in a country where the baby becomes a citizen at birth, especially when the birth is planned to facilitate eventual legal residency for the family. In 2011, the term was even added to the New American Heritage Dictionary’s recently published fifth edition, solidifying its place in American politics. The term is widely regarded as derogatory and offensive. In simpler terms, it refers to a child born in a country that grants birthright citizenship, like the US, to non-citizen parents, implying the child exists only to grant them legal citizenship in the future.
The origin of the term
Who coined the term anchor baby? Well, the world would love to know. But how did it become famous? That’s a story to tell. Some earlier ideas along the term came in the 1980s. They were used to refer to Southeast Asian immigrant teens who came to the U.S. to help and support their family members back home, as per a 2011 analysis of the term by independent researcher Alexander Williams and Stanford professor Gave Ignatow. It was in 2006 that the term as we know it came about. In late 2005, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill requiring a 700-mile fence on the border and raising penalties for illegal immigration. A few months later, the Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill giving some illegal immigrants a path to legal status. While neither became a law, they led to protests and debates where the term ‘anchor baby’ became a common term.
Is Vivek Ramaswamy an ‘anchor baby’?
Yes, this is the question you might have read all of the above for, or scrolled down directly to. Let’s delve in. Vivek Ramaswamy was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a National Institute of Technology Calicut graduate, built a career as an engineer and patent attorney at General Electric, his mother Geetha Ramaswamy, a graduate of Mysore Medical College & Research Institute, who worked as a geriatric psychiatrist, immigrated to the U.S. from Kerala, India, legally. According to the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a child born on U.S. soil has U.S. citizenship. In a 2024 conversation with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds at the Iowa State Fair in August, Ramaswamy shared that his father is not a U.S. citizen and never took the test, a choice he “made for familial reasons.” However, his mother took the citizenship test and was naturalised as a citizen. Considering only one of his parents holds a U.S. citizenship, factually, Vivek Ramaswamy is not an anchor baby. Adding the fact that the term is a political slur and heavily loaded with derogatory meaning, it is just another verbal ammunition for the supporters of the conservative immigration rhetoric and not one that should be used in regard to the Republican.
Why is the term still in use?
With immigration still being one of the most strategically politicised, publicly debated and critically condemned issues in America, any related term is welcomed. But what makes ‘anchor baby’ special is the fact that it raises a question that gets the blood boiling, “Who is an American?” With that comes all the added ones, like who pays the taxes, who votes, who plans a family, who gets educated, who has a government and who is protected by the military. It’s a loaded moral question for a nation that was established by foreigners. But considering the now of America, which is filled with ICE raids and arrests, H-1B uprooting and penalising policy decisions, ‘anchor baby’ is a term that shows just how a section of people love categorising and offending others to feed their own ideology. Go to Source
