your entire anchor baby paragraph is legally wrong and out of date.
in 1996 the law changed.
in your pre-1996 view custody follows the parents. That is not correct now. Now custody follows the parents and teh child goes with the deprted parents.
The child claims citizenship IMMEDIATLY not at 18.
at 18 the child can come to live in the USA independently.
also you do not consider that for the out of the country child citizen, in order for THEIR children to claim citizenship they have to live IN the usa for 10 years.
It is a break in the chain.
http://www.uscis.gov on citizenship by birth, and the 10 rule.
plese keep this in mind.
Thanks for the clarification. I knew that the “anchor baby” could claim citizenship immediately, and that his status won’t stop his parents from being deported (and him with his parents). However, I thought that at 18, when the “anchor baby” has the right to return to the U.S., he could immediately bring his parents in; I’m glad to hear that that is no longer the case, and that he has to live in the U.S. for 10 years before he can apply to have his parents become U.S. residents.
You’re right that I assumed that the pre-1996 rules were in effect; I had a friend in college that was a U.S. citizen by virtue of having been born in the U.S. when his parents were in college (his parents had student visas), and he was filling out the paper work to bring his parents over. It was back in Fall 1993 or Spring 1994, before the 1994 elections brought the GOP into power, and I guess he was lucky he got all that done before the law changed.