VivirLatino

Via Racewire comes the disgusting, but sadly not shocking, news that the 14th Amendment will be the next target in Russel Pearce’s (the author of SB 1070) campaign against immigrants.

Pearce writes in one e-mail: “I also intend to push for an Arizona bill that would refuse to accept or issue a birth certificate that recognizes citizenship to those born to illegal aliens, unless one parent is a citizen.”

One of the more remarkable e-mails sent to a list of supporters detailed his next steps: The e-mail, several pages long, includes articles critical of the 14th Amendment, which gives babies born on U.S. soil automatic citizenship.

One of the e-mails written by someone else but forwarded by Pearce reads: “If we are going to have an effect on the anchor baby racket, we need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that’s the way nature made it. Men don’t drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do.”

If we take just a minute here to do a little supposing, we can really see how preposterous and dangerous it is to assume that women are the sole instigators in “dropping anchors.”

Let’s pretend a Mexican man gets together with a white female citizen. The white woman gets pregnant. The man leaves–leaving the citizen baby with her citizen mother.

Did the man just drop an anchor here? Is that baby a citizen or an anchor? Does the white mother bear sole legal responsibility for bearing an anchor baby? How do we punish that mother for bearing an anchor baby? And if we don’t assume this baby is an anchor baby, why do we assume *women* get pregnant with the exclusive desire to get citizenship, and men don’t? Can’t men use their citizen child just as vindictively as women can?

And are we to assume that citizen women who get pregnant with “illegal sperm” are really so innocent? That they aren’t hopeful, didn’t specifically *suggest*–let’s get pregnant so you can stay here!

There are simply too many holes in any scenario (another example: parents come here legally [as most do] and their papers expire. Kids are born when papers are legal. Are they anchor babies?]) based in reality to find a credible reason to target mothers/women specifically–but that really doesn’t seem to matter much.

As most of us involved in pro-immigration work know, the decision to target mothers/women has been gaining steam and support for years, decades, really. There is no logic behind any of the arguments–except that mothers/women are easiest to target.

Which brings up the difficult question: when you know that a group is being targeted exclusively because of hate–how do you *logically* fight that? How do “5 Myths about Immigrants” posts (which I do find very helpful, by the way) stand up against an emotion–an intense passionate emotion that most people can’t even really explain coherently?