I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Steve Terrell of the Santa Fe New Mexican notes that the Milford Daily News called Governor Bill Richardson an “anchor baby,” a derogatory term used to refer to a child, born in the United States to immigrant parents, who is a citizen and can act as an anchor for other family who wish to come to the U.S.
Richardson was born in Pasadena, Calif. to an American father and a Mexican mother.
The Milford Daily News, a newspaper from Massachusetts, says an anchor baby is “an offspring of an illegal immigrant or other non-citizen, who under current legal interpretation of the 14th Constitutional Amendment becomes a United States citizen at birth.”
The 14th amendment definition has gained some recent recognition from conservatives because of, in part, a section of a book by conservative Fox News and talk radio host Glenn Beck who mentioned the 14th Amendment and said the “21st century revision” of the amendment is:
All persons who successfully sneak into the country will be allowed to stay indefinitely. All crimes committed by those lawbreakers (i.e., identity theft, fraud, and tax evasion) will be ignored. These non-American Americans will be afforded free health care at emergency rooms, free education, and special in-state tuition deals at colleges, not afforded legal citizens. All children born of these lawbreakers shall immediately become citizens of the United States. Any person attempting to thwart this revision of Section I will be labeled racists, hatemongers, xenophobes, and all-around bad people.
Terrell, a veteran political reporter who has covered Richardson for years, writes of the assertion that Richardson is an “anchor baby:”
The governor’s grandfather was a biologist who collected specimens for several American museums, Richardson wrote. His dad was born when his family was headed to Central America on a field trip. “The fact that he was born outside the country was something my father resented all his life,” Richardson wrote [in his autobiography Between Worlds]. “He had an American upbringing, growing up in Boston.”
Granted, I’ve heard a couple of theories from Richardson haters that the elder Richardson wasn’t a citizen, but I haven’t given much thought to such chatter.
