Patrick Keefe boards a flight to the Chinese province of Fujian,
takes his seat in first class, and is astonished to discover that
half his fellow passengers are... babies. So begins a
Slate travel dispatch that doubles as the most astonishing
immigration story I've read this year.
An excerpt:
The Fujianese are known for their work ethic and
entrepreneurial zeal, and the new arrivals fanned across the United
States and started businesses. That generic Chinese restaurant in
the strip mall near your house? Almost certainly run by Fujianese.
Those no-frills "Chinatown buses" that initially linked Eastern
seaboard cities and now rival Greyhound, crisscrossing the
continent? A Fujianese innovation.
The Fujianese in America work so hard, in fact, that when they
have babies -- babies who, by virtue of being born on American
soil, are U.S. citizens -- they don't have time to raise them. So,
they send the babies home, back to the very villages the parents
left, to be raised by their grandparents. The babies sitting around
me -- who begin screaming in unison as the plane nears Fuzhou and
begins its descent -- are packing something that many of their
chaperones lack: U.S. passports.
As an immigration columnist who opposed illegal immigration, I
always cringed most when I read about someone brought to the United
States illegally as a baby, raised here, and deported at age 12 or
16 or 21 to a country they'd never known. They considered
themselves American, as did everyone they knew -- their technical
legal status seemed neither just, given their innocence, nor a
reflection of their loyalty to our country.
The story above portends an almost opposite problem: a decade or
two hence there will be adults who are Chinese in every way except
the most legalistic one, but who are entitled to live, work and
vote in America without going through any of the safeguards or
assimilative features our immigration process (or growing up here)
affords.
Americans sometimes fret about whether so-called anchor babies
and illegal immigrant kids will grow up loyal to the country of
their ancestry or the country of their upbringing. I find these
"anchorless babies" more cause for concern.
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