The Myth of Anchor Babies

The phrase "anchor baby" slices through political discourse with cruel efficiency. You've heard it—perhaps on news channels, debate stages, or even from the mouths of those who share our heritage. It transforms a newborn child into a tactic, a weapon, a calculated move in some imagined immigration chess game.

But what if everything you've been told about birthright citizenship is fundamentally wrong? While the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born on American soil, the idea that undocumented parents gain immediate legal status through their American-born children is pure fiction. The reality? Parents must wait until that child turns 21 before they can even apply for sponsorship—with no guarantee of approval. This podcast tears apart the notion that people endure dangerous journeys, leave everything behind, and build new lives just to implement a strategy with a 21-year waiting period.

Beyond debunking myths, we dive into the psychology behind why some immigrants themselves perpetuate these harmful narratives. When someone says, "I did it the right way, so should everyone else," they're often protecting their own trauma rather than protecting justice. Immigration isn't a standardized test—it's a survival tactic that looks different for every family based on their unique circumstances, resources, and dangers faced. The uncomfortable truth is that scapegoating immigrants distracts us from asking harder questions about who really benefits from our economic system. While we argue about who deserves to be here, wealth continues to flow upward, not laterally to each of us.

Who gets to belong, and who gets to decide? If you've never questioned the language we use around immigration or considered the human cost of these myths, this episode offers both facts and compassion. Listen, share, and ask someone who believes these myths: "Why do you believe that? Who told you that? What if they were wrong?" Subscribe now and join our community of thinkers who refuse to accept easy answers to complex human questions.

Resources Mentioned:

Stats

May 2025 from IPSOS: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-oppose-ending-birthright-citizenship

May 2025 from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/15/g-s1-66693/majority-of-americans-oppose-ending-birthright-citizenship-npr-ipsos-poll-finds

Pew Research February 2025:

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Have a Cup of Johnny
• 0:37 Confronting the "Anchor Baby" Myth
• 3:15 The Truth About Birthright Citizenship
• 5:21 When Immigrants Turn Against Immigrants
• 9:34 Fear-Mongering and Scapegoating Explained
• 15:10 Who Gets to Belong?

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Oh we could, we could fly. Welcome back to have a Cup of Johnny. This season isn't about hustling harder. It's about coming home to yourself, to your voice, to your breath, to the quiet truth that you're still here and you're not starting over. You're starting again. This is your space to reflect, reset and remember who we tell you. So pour your cafecito and let's begin.

Speaker 1: 0:37

They call them anchor babies and I wish I could say that phrase only lives in the shadows of anonymous comment sections. But no, it's been on the debate stage, on mainstream news, even said by people who look like me. It's a term loaded with accusation that someone gave birth not out of joy or survival or hope, but as a tactic, that the baby was a weapon, that the child was a scam, that belonging should be earned. Today, in have a Cup of Johnny, we are talking about that myth, not just where it came from, but what it reveals About who we think deserves to be here and why so many of us yes, even Latinos get caught in the lie. This is episode 2 in our July series Debunking Immigration. All right, so I have to do a disclaimer, y'all, because I am in my living room because Charlie does not like to be alone. Charlie is the latest rescued fur baby and he cries whenever he doesn't see someone. So I have to be here so that way he can be quiet. But you may hear a little whimper or a little bark here and there.

Speaker 1: 2:13

Okay, but let's get into it. When people say anchor baby, what they're really saying is this you don't belong and you knew it. And now you're trying to cheat your way in and they say what? This disgust with this certainty? And let me tell you, certainty is rarely a good substitute for truth. Because here's the truth A child born in the US is a US citizen. That's the 14th Amendment. And here's another truth that child cannot anchor their undocumented parents plural or parent singular, they cannot. That parent will have to wait 21 years until that child is 21. And even then, family reunification is not automatic and it's not guaranteed. So this idea, which is wild to me, that immigrants come here just to have babies wait 21 years to get papers, it's not just wrong, it's ridiculous. But what's more problematic is that it's almost like it's designed to make someone resent a child, a literal newborn, as if birth is this strategy, as if survival is suspicious.

Speaker 1: 3:52

But let me give you some numbers here and these are from 2023 Pew Research Survey. So, from this 2023 Pew Research Survey, 60% of Americans believe babies born in the US, even to undocumented parents, should be granted citizenship. Ie, they support the current birthright law, which is you're born here. Regardless of your parents' documentation, you are a citizen. But 37% Let me say that again 37% disagree, and now that number right there jumps. This, which means that those kids born here, whether their parents are legal or not, should be citizens. Whether their parents are legal or not, should be citizens. Then Rauter's Ipsos, june 2025, shows 52% of Americans support the 14th Amendment as is, while 24% oppose ending birthright citizenship. Emerson College polling, june 2025, shows 68 percent, while 32 percent opposing it. Npr Ipsos of May 2025 shows a slim majority of 53% saying keep it as is and 28% saying no, get rid of it. We have YouGov that has 51% say all children born in the US should automatically become citizens and 39% say citizenship should be granted only if parents are citizens, and this poll was taken in February 2025.

Speaker 1: 6:18

The biggest divide in all of these is the partisan divide, and that's what I just said. So usually far right conservatives oppose the 14th amendment, staying as is, while left-leaning people or Democrats, they support the 14th amendment as is, so it's still. Some margins are smaller than others, depending on who did the research or who did the statistical pool, but also how they worded the question as well, because remember that matters quite a lot in statistics is how you word the question right. So, depending on those two factors that's why statistics should be taken with a grain of salt it still shows a slight majority of people being for the 14th Amendment as opposed to changing it. And I also understand as well that if you're a conservative and far right and then you surround yourself with the same kind of people as you, then it's got to be an echo chamber and that's what you're going to see, that's what you're going to hear. And then you are going to say, well, most of us, or all of us, disagree, but that's because you're staying in your circle. The same thing. If you put the shoe in the other foot, if you're just with a whole bunch of Democrats or left-leaning people and that's all that you consume, that's all that you're in, then you're going to be like no, all of us are.

Speaker 1: 7:57

With the current birthright law, if they're born here, they're citizens, you know, regardless of their parent status. So that's why take it with a grain of salt, okay, regardless of the statistics. It's not just statistics for the sake of being statistic, it's tension. A country, regardless, is split between those who see birth as belonging and those who see it as a loophole. And I want to take like a break here and talk to my own community, my own community of Latinos, immigrants first, gens, in-betweeners, because sometimes the loudest voices against birthright citizenship are white.

Speaker 1: 8:39

There are people who did it the hard way, and when I say white, I mean white Anglo-Saxon. There are people in our community who say you know, I did it, I did it the right way. What they're really trying to say is I did it the right way, I did it the hard way. What they really want to say is I waited in line, I paid fees, I did it right. You know I was miserable, I went through this horrible experience, and so should everyone else. That's essentially what they say, and to that I say you're not wrong about your path, like you can boast about that. You know what I'm saying. Good for you, you did all of that, you achieved something, but that doesn't make it the only path and certainly that doesn't make it the path that is available for everyone.

Speaker 1: 9:30

And that's where that mindset is wholly misguided and short-sighted. And there's a certain psychology there as well, because I'm always thinking when I come across people online or in real life, it's just the psychology behind their actions and how they feel. And it's like this. I feel like they have this miserable kind of logic that says, if I suffered, you must suffer too. And, like I showed in the caption of one of my videos, it's like those people that are like no, I don't want student loans to be forgiven, I paid all of mine and I had to do all of this and sacrifice and eat ramen and all this other stuff, you know, and all this other shit, and I'm like so did I.

Speaker 1: 10:19

But if somebody else can go through life a little bit easier, why not? I don't feel the need to have people carry the same trauma that I do. You know, I would want the next generation to evolve. They're going to have their own evolved trauma that they will have to deal with, something that we in the generation before have never come across. They will have their own.

Speaker 1: 10:46

I didn't come up with social media and all this other stuff, that whole cyber bullying shit. That was never me. I never experienced any of that. But these kids do you know what I'm saying? So, so to say, because I suffered like this, everyone else in front of me and the next generations must suffer as well. That, to me, is ridiculous, and really what it is is just trauma that one has that one wants to pass to others, and you see this in family cycles, you see it in classrooms, you see it in military hazing, and it shows up in immigration too. I didn't have help, so you shouldn't either. I gave up everything, so you should too. If it was hard for me, you don't deserve ease. But here's the problem Once again. We're not all working with the same resources. Not the same education, not the same access, not the same safety.

Speaker 1: 11:48

Immigration is not a standardized test. It's a survival tactic. Most, because I'm not going to say all most immigrants and I know that was for my example we don't come here for the shits and giggles. We come here because we need to come here, because staying over there means that we would have died, we wouldn't have survived, we wouldn't have access to medical, to education, to upward mobility, to be able to come out of that poverty hole that we was in you see what I'm saying and to be able to raise our families and lift our families to live and we're not talking rich, we're just talking to live with dignity and respect. You know, we find ourselves within a rock and a hard place, as people say, in order to move, to leave everything behind, to leave everything that we know the language, the culture, the food, the climate, everything and go into the unknown. And that is one of the toughest things that anyone has to do. That is literally starting over everything, starting everything over. No one does that lightly. So that's what I'm saying. Immigration is not like a standardized test, it's a survival tactic and it looks different for every family. So when we applied this, I did it the right way. Energy we're not protecting justice. What we're doing is we're protecting our own trauma. Now let's zoom this out before Charlie gets really upset here.

Speaker 1: 13:33

There's another group that buys into this myth People who have never had to navigate the immigration system at all. They're not close to it, they just watch it on social media and the news, and yet they swear up and down that immigrants are stealing something. Jobs, housing, health care an American dream, yada, yada, yada thing. Jobs, housing, health care an American dream, yada, yada, yada. But if you scratch beneath the surface, scratch, scratch. It's not facts holding up that belief, it's fear and manipulation.

Speaker 1: 14:03

I've read, and you heard me talk about this, you've heard me say how I read the book Cultish a while back by Amanda Montel, and she talks about how cults don't always look like robes and rituals as one would see in movies and things of that nature. Sometimes cults look like echo chambers, where language becomes law, where simple answers are sold to complicated questions and where, most importantly, scapegoats are necessary. Because, think about it, if they can blame immigrants, then you don't have to ask harder questions like why is housing so expensive? Why are wages so low? Why are billionaires paying less in taxes than teachers? And you know what the answer is it's not the immigrant, it's the system that funnels money from the bottom up. That's not immigration, that's exploitation.

Speaker 1: 15:05

So let's go back to where we started in this episode anchor baby. What if we dropped the insult and just said baby, a baby is a beginning, a baby is a future. A baby doesn't anchor, they lift, they grow, they remind us of what still matters and they belong. Here's a real question we need to be asking who gets to belong and who gets to decide? If the answer depends on race paperwork and whether someone did it the hard way, then maybe we've anchored ourselves to the wrong values.

Speaker 1: 15:51

If this episode stirs something in you, share it. Share it with somebody who said that phrase. Share it with someone who hasn't thought deeply about it and ask them why do you believe that? Who told you that? What if they were wrong? In the show notes I've linked stats from Pew, a breakdown of the 14th Amendment and a few articles to make this very plain Birthright citizenship isn't a loophole, it's a promise. Next week we're talking about the myth of just getting lying and why that lying doesn't exist for most people. Until then, keep your heart open, don't let that close, your facts verified and your empathy loud. Thank you for having this cup with me. See you next Wednesday. Bye. If today's episode spoke to you, share with somebody who's finding their way back too, and if you haven't yet, visit haveacupofjoanniecom for more stories, blog posts and the bits that started it all. Thank you for being here. Until next time, be soft, be bold and always have a cup of John.