Plus, the US actually does something less-dumb, and expands citizenship to people born in the country, regardless of their parents' status or race. ("Jus soli")

Why is promoting birth tourism/anchor babies less dumb? I.e., what makes the child of a wealthy chinese woman who visits CA to give birth more deserving of citizenship than peasant who worked very hard to attend college and jump through our citizenship hoops?

The original motivation for this rule was to prevent disenfranchisement of former slaves. That goal was achieved, and is no longer relevant since all former slaves are dead.

Pregnant women are screened out during the visa interview process to prevent this from occurring. It's not perfect, in the case of individuals receiving multi-year visas, but those are only provided to individuals who have spent significant time in the US, or have family members who are citizens. Also, a baby born in the US to a non-US citizen parent does not automatically confer the parent with citizenship or permanent residency rights. In the case of "anchor babies", the child usually will not have the right to sponsor his parents for residency until they are 18.

What makes the parents of an anchor baby more deserving of citizenship than a person who worked hard, went to school and developed skills useful to the US? Why do we consider this more beneficial to the US than instead importing the highly skilled person who goes through the system rather than subverting it?

(Again, working within the normative framework suggesting immigration should be restricted, which is not my view.)

>What makes the parents of an anchor baby more deserving of citizenship than a person who worked hard, went to school and developed skills useful to the US?

I can't say, as I didn't write the laws. My guess is that US immigration law is designed to limit skilled immigration because educated Americans in white collar jobs can raise a bigger stink politically about H1B competition in high-wage industries than working class Americans can.

As a foreign student who completed his undergrad education in the US, my student visa interview required me to show evidence that I would not try to use the F1 student visa to transition to H1B or a different visa class that can be linked to a green card application down the line. This is standard policy, as my friends who're also US-educated had the same questions during their interview.

It's also difficult to enforce because once you're in the country and have completed your education, you can be recruited by a company who will sponsor your H1B, at which point the ICE will evaluate it as they would any other H1B application. So the whole rigmarole seems pointless to me, but that is bureaucracy for you.

It's not really about the parent so much as the child. The child deserves to have parents that are present in its life.

The parents can raise the child in their home country if that's an important concern. As far as I know, no country will deprive a child of citizenship simply because he was born while the parents were on vacation.

Right, there's no chance of that being impractical or harmful to the child.

Of course it's harmful to the child. But there are millions of children born in various parts of the world who would suffer the same harms. Why should we protect a Mexican child who's parents crept across the border to give birth, but not an Indian child who's parents applied for immigration but were rejected?

I feel like you are implicitly appealing to a very extreme version of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...

The question isn't who we should protect, but who the US government should protect in the course of implementing its immigration policy. The Indian child is not a US citizen.

If you scroll up you'll see that we are discussing whether current policy is good, not what current policy actually is. "Is" != "aught".

Yes, I know. I think that it is legitimate for the US government to prioritize the interests of US citizens in implementing and defining its immigration policy. After all, if it did not, the US would simply have open borders, and there is not much point in discussing that hypothetical.

Pregnancy tourism is rampant. There are businesses in L.A. that advertise it on the web, even.

There are many methods, one common one being to lie about how many weeks pregnant the woman is (note, for example, the woman who gave birth en route on a flight that had to be diverted to Alaska last October).

No, I favor open borders.

But if we are going to have limited immigration, we should do it on the basis of choosing the most valuable immigrants. At the moment, fully 74% of immigration [1] to the US is based solely on nepotism.

Also, it's silly to suggest that I favor splitting up families - I oppose preventing immigrants from going back home to be with their family. We aren't a slave state. (For much the same reason I oppose our various penalties for Americans renouncing their citizenship.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_reunification#Family_re...

>I oppose preventing immigrants from going back home to be with their familU.

You're not making any sense. I'm British and met my husband when working in Canada. One of us has to immigrate somewhere in order for us to be together.

I think he's saying that someone here illegally should be able to return to country of origin and then re-enter illegally at will, protected from repatriation. This puts a premium on entering the country by whatever means and at whatever risk.

He was saying that being married to a US citizen should not enable a person to enter the US legally. (He said "sleeping with", but in fact the US does not generally grant dependant visas to unmarried partners.)

Not quite, I'm saying that from a utilitarian perspective, importing wives for US citizens is not better for the country than importing high skilled workers.

I'm also saying that from a justice perspective, banging an American and getting him pony up for marriage doesn't make a person intrinsically more deserving of citizenship than working hard and creating (potential) value for the US.

Again - I'm generally an open borders proponent. What I say we should do is stop using violence to prevent peaceful people from entering the US and engaging in trade here. (And we should make whatever economic adjustments are necessary to prevent an increase in state-induced violence/threats of violence, e.g. eliminate the welfare state.)

But if I accept the logic behind restricted borders (e.g. "we can't handle too many more" and "immigration should benefit natives"), that logic doesn't really support nepotism based immigration.

You appear to be very cynical about marriage and relationships in general. Visas are granted to the spouses of US citizens because the US recognizes the right of these citizens to have a family life. It is not only the spouse who is harmed if the visa is denied but also the US citizen in question, whose rights the US government is obliged to recognize. Utilitarian considerations are largely irrelevant. As far as justice is concerned, I don't see why you think it would be unjust to grant visas to spouses. Of course spouses of US citizens are not the only people who should be granted visas, but no-one suggested that was the case.

> No, I favor open borders.

I once thought that way too. However I was advised to consider a country as a body, as a cell, tissue, or organ. Then one thing became clearer, the need to police boundaries. Not necessarily in a militant manner, or with belligerence. nature. But that boundaries are a good thing.