Genderacing immigrant subjects: ‘anchor babies’ and the politics of birthright citizenship

Kim, Joon K.; Sagás, Ernesto; Cespedes, Karina

doi:10.1080/13504630.2017.1376281

Cited by 20 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Decades of such negative rhetoric gave Donald Trump fertile ground to draw upon during his presidential campaign, which he began on June 16, 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals, and rapists (TIME, 2015). Candidate Trump also targeted Americans of Mexican origin by using the term "anchor babies" and questioning the fairness of a judge because his parents were Mexican immigrants (Chavez, 2017;Kim et al, 2017;Rappeport, 2015). Nor was he alone.…”

Section: Anti-mexican Rhetoricmentioning

confidence: 99%

Words hurt: Political rhetoric, emotions/affect, and psychological well-being among Mexican-origin youth

Chávez

Campos

Corona³

et al. 2019

Social Science & Medicine

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We examined the effect of political rhetoric on the targets of that rhetoric. Drawing from scholarship on anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant rhetoric found readily in various media and scholarship on emotions, we tested four hypotheses. Hypotheses 1 and 2 predicted that positive and negative political rhetoric would increase and decrease positive and negative emotions, respectively. Hypotheses 3 and 4 then predicted that emotional responses to positive or negative political rhetoric would influence perceived stress, subjective health, and subjective wellbeing. Data collection occurred between August 2016 and June 2017 at a university in California. A sample of 280 Mexican-origin youth, defined broadly as having at least one ancestor born in Mexico or the participant themselves born in Mexico, participated in an experiment where they were randomly assigned to one of three study conditions: viewing (1) positive or (2) negative political rhetoric about immigrants and Latinos in general, or (3) neutral rhetoric as a control condition before providing qualitative responses to open-ended questions and completing measures of positive and negative affect, perceived stress, subjective health, and subjective wellbeing. Qualitative responses indicated that negative and positive political rhetoric elicited a range of negative emotions and positive emotions, respectively. Quantitative analysis with independent samples t-tests, ANOVA, and linear regression models found that negative political rhetoric elicited higher negative affect than positive and neutral rhetoric, and positive rhetoric elicited higher positive affect than negative and neutral rhetoric. Negative emotional responses, in turn, were associated with participants' higher perceived stress, lower subjective health and lower subjective well-being. Conversely, positive emotional responses were associated with lower perceived stress, higher subjective health, and higher subjective well-being. Positive political rhetoric, by eliciting positive emotions, can have a salubrious effect. Altogether, these findings suggest that political rhetoric matters for the targets of that rhetoric. In June 2018, a White woman in Running Springs, California, approached Esteban Guzman, a U.S. citizen, and his mother who were gardening and told them to "go back to Mexico" and unleashed other anti-Mexican rants. Guzman asked, "Why do you hate us?" She replied, "Because you're Mexicans." He said, "We're honest people." The woman laughed, and said, "You're rapists, drug dealers. Even the President of the United States says you're a rapist." Guzman: "Thanks to him (Donald Trump) everywhere I go I am a rapist, an animal, and drug dealer. You don't know what it feels like to be hated so much."

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Section: Anti-mexican Rhetoricmentioning

confidence: 99%

Words hurt: Political rhetoric, emotions/affect, and psychological well-being among Mexican-origin youth

Chávez

Campos

Corona³

et al. 2019

Social Science & Medicine

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“…Sean Wang (2017) contextualizes the panic over Asian birth tourism in California through the notion of reproductive futurism, the idea that national priorities can be framed through the fate of an imaginary child, and notes that in the US, that child is a white citizen. Practices of forced sterilization in Puerto Rico, contraceptive dumping in South America, and the promotion of Depo-Provera and IUDs as forms of poverty reduction amongst communities of color in the US are all examples of how the US attempts to manage the reproduction of people of color, and migrant women face similar dehumanizing treatment (Kim et al., 2018; Ruiz, 2002).…”

Section: The Dangers Of Migrant Fertilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The “weaponization of the birth canal,” as Joon Kim et al. (2018: 312) write, is always racialized, but increasingly the debate over migrant reproduction uses ‘illegality’ as a proxy for race, skin color, or national origin.…”

Section: The Dangers Of Migrant Fertilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(2018: 312) write, is always racialized, but increasingly the debate over migrant reproduction uses ‘illegality’ as a proxy for race, skin color, or national origin. Debates over “anchor babies,” for instance, rely on imaginaries of white citizenship and racialized non-citizenship to inform the discussion of migrant fertility, where by using citizenship as a proxy for racialization, proponents of reproductive controls can perform a “non-racial discussion of a racial subject” (Kim et al., 2018: 319). The use of citizenship as a proxy for racialization allows for the racialization of new categories of migrants.…”

Section: The Dangers Of Migrant Fertilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, Imogen Tyler (2013: 216) documents how the 2007 UK government report titled “Enforcing the Rules: A strategy to ensure and enforce compliance with immigration laws” claimed that “heavily pregnant women were arriving in the UK with an intention of using NHS maternity services” despite having no empirical data to support this claim (Home Office, 2007). Joon Kim et al. (2018) describe similar panic over birth tourism in the US, with, for example, the Arcadia Police Department in California having to hire a full-time staff member to take calls from concerned citizens reporting pregnant Asian women walking through the streets of town.…”

Section: The Dangers Of Migrant Fertilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Incompatible with life: Embodied borders, migrant fertility, and the UK’s ‘hostile environment’

Coddington

2020

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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In this piece, I consider the uncomfortable and intimate intersection of bodies and borders through an autoethnographic account of encountering UK migration controls while losing a pregnancy. While this encounter was not representative of the disproportionate targeting of refused asylum seeker and undocumented migrants by these policies, I argue that migrant fertility has become a key lens through which the embodiment of the border is made material, and that the post-2012 deployment of a UK-wide set of policies generating a “Hostile Environment” for migrants demonstrates how the UK is embracing discomfort as a political strategy to deter migrants. Migrant fertility becomes perceived as an anticipatory threat to the body politic that must be continually pre-empted by the state. The restrictive policies of the UK’s hostile environment have exacerbated the perceived threat of fertile migrants, and that the threat posed by these migrants has become both racialized and medicalized, with multi-scalar, material consequences for migrants.

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Thematic Analysis of Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Latinx Immigrant Families in the Southern US

Phipps

Stivers

Dawson

et al. 2022

Int J Adv Counselling

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Genderacing immigrant subjects: ‘anchor babies’ and the politics of birthright citizenship

Cited by 20 publications

References 4 publications

Words hurt: Political rhetoric, emotions/affect, and psychological well-being among Mexican-origin youth

Words hurt: Political rhetoric, emotions/affect, and psychological well-being among Mexican-origin youth

Incompatible with life: Embodied borders, migrant fertility, and the UK’s ‘hostile environment’

Thematic Analysis of Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Latinx Immigrant Families in the Southern US

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