It may be time to offer this forlorn candidate some free advice. Although if he really is the smarter Bush, he knows these things already:
1. He should never let himself say the words “anchor babies” ever again. He got in trouble for using that derogatory reference to the children of unauthorized immigrants in passing, in an interview, then dug himself a hole by defending his use of it. On Monday, he dug deeper. He tried to explain that he had been talking about “Asian people” who arrive on tourist visas through organized schemes to give birth to American babies on American soil.
Though the phenomenon is real, Mr. Bush was blasted by Asian-American groups for repeating the slur. And, astoundingly, he handed Mr. Trump the opportunity to send out tweets like this: “In a clumsy move to get out of his ‘anchor babies’ dilemma, where he signed that he would not use the term and now uses it, he blamed ASIANS.”
It was such an unnecessary battle to wade into — maternity tourism is not what Mr. Trump and his enablers on the restrictionist right are talking about. When they say “anchor babies,” they are talking about the browning of America, with its growing Latino population, and recasting it as a sinister plot by child-rearing Mexicans. They want to upend the 14thAmendment, and the country’s family-based immigration laws, to keep the population as white as can be. Maternity tourism by middle-class foreigners is a separate, much smaller issue; changing the Constitution to stop it, as one immigrant rights advocate once put it, is like killing a fly with an Uzi.
via Jeb Bush Visita la Frontera – The New York Times.
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