The number of anchor babies – those born on US soil to foreign mothers – exploded in America during Joe Biden’s term as president.
According to data from the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), there was an explosion in anchor babies in the Biden era, especially among women born in Latin America.
In the year to October 2024, the number of babies born to women born outside the US was up 4.77% on 2023, while the number of babies born to Hispanic women born outside America rose 6.13%.
Of these Hispanic births, four countries predominated. The number of babies born to Cuban women increased by 12.84%; to Haitian women by 14.86%; and to Nicaraguan women by 17.48%. The number of babies born in America to Venezuelan women grew by an astonishing 56.46%.
Haiti was particularly prominent in the statistics, and at least 5% of the country’s population now lives in the US. At the same time, “[around] 5% of all non-Hispanic black children born in the U.S. last year were to Haitian mothers,” political commentator Ryan Girdusky told Border Hawk News.
The surge in anchor babies comes after immigration records were broken under Joe Biden including the largest migration surge in US history.
Under the Biden administration the net increase in immigration averaged 2.4 million a year from 2021 to 2023, while the total increase in immigration during the same period is estimated at over 8 million.
This marks a higher rate of immigration than the Ellis Island era, when millions of Europeans flooded into America, making the current wave of immigrants the largest since at least 1850.
Most of this was driven by illegal immigration. As per a Goldman Sachs report, around 60% of the migrants who have entered the United States since 2021 have done so illegally.
This rise in legal and illegal immigration has seen America record its highest ever share of foreign-born residents. The proportion of the American population born in another country grew from 13.6% in 2020 to 15.2% in 2023, eclipsing the previous high of 14.8% in 1890.
Many of these arrivals entered America under migration law amendments made by the former administration.
In January 2023 the Biden government launched the CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela) Parole Program for eligible applicants from those four countries. The administration also facilitated easier legal access for immigrants via the CBP One phone app.
Both of those initiatives rapidly accelerated immigration to America. As of November last year over 1.4 million people had entered the US since the start of 2023 under either CBP One or CHNV, Border Hawk News reported.
Many more also entered via pathways like the Family Reunification Program or the Central American Minors Program.
“So many came pregnant because they knew they had a window to come to the United States legally and they had children, literally by the boatload in some cases,” Mr Girdusky said of the sudden influx of CHNV women,
“Those four countries’ birth rates are through the roof in the United States because they knew how weak Joe Biden was. [Donald] Trump has to get ahold of this because we cannot be the world’s nursery where they can just plop a baby here and the whole family shows up,” he added.
President Trump has acted to end this and other parts of America’s immigration program.
Among his first acts since returning to office, the President ended the CBP One app and issued an executive order seeking to stop so-called ‘birthright citizenship’ via a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment. The order has since been blocked by a federal judge.
The order, should it be successful, aims to end the practice of granting US citizenship to anyone born on US soil. The United States is one of few countries that offers citizenship on the basis of jus soli (“right of soil”) as opposed to the more common basis of jus sanguinis (“right of blood”).
If Trump’s order is upheld it would stop the practice of “birth-tourism” by which foreign women deliberately travel to America to give birth. This is a trend that organisations like the Centre for Immigration Studies estimate is responsible for up to 33,000 births in America annually.
The US-born babies are eligible for all the health, education and other benefits conferred on US citizens, and when the child turns 21 the young adult is able to sponsor further family members to emigrate to America – hence the term “anchor baby”.
In Australia the closest comparison to US-style anchor babies are examples like the Biloela Family. This is the Sri Lankan pair of Nadesalingam Murugappan and Kokilapathmapriya Nadesalingam who arrived in the country illegally during the Rudd-Gillard years.
After arriving separately on people-smuggler boats, the couple gave birth to two daughters while in legal limbo and settled in the Queensland town of Biloela.
Despite repeated findings that they were not refugees and that they had not been truthful in their visa applications, the Muragappans were granted permanent visas after a sustained campaign of pro-migrant pressure and support.
