14th Amendment Babies

14^th Amendment Baby is a term used to refer to a child born in the United States to illegal aliens or other non-citizens. Such a child is legally a citizen of the United States. The term refers to a resident alien's child's role in facilitating chain migration under the provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965. Such a baby becomes the anchor of a chain by which its family may receive benefits from social programs such as Aid to Dependent Children, subsidized low income housing, and by which the parents may themselves eventually become lawful permanent residents or citizens of the United States.

A US-born child can in fact sponsor his/her parents for legal immigration to the United States when he/she becomes an adult, but illegal immigrant parents do not gain any immediate additional legal rights based solely on the fact that they have had a child born in the US. However, illegal immigrant parents of US-born children often avoid deportation by immigration judges because they are the biological parents of minors, who have every right to be in the US as citizens. This is the flimsy "separation of families" argument. Deporting the illegal parents of US-born children need not necessarily cause the legal breakup of families. Parents should feel obligated to take their minor children with them if they are deported. Nevertheless, liberal judges are often unwilling to recognize this obligation and allow the parents to stay, completely thwarting any semblance of a rational immigration and deportation policy. When the child becomes an adult, the child can apply to sponsor his or her foreign-born parents for U.S. citizenship.

The term "14th Amendment Babies" is also used to refer to children born to women who are legally in the US on temporary visas (for example a visitor’s visa) when the child's birth is specifically intended to obtain citizenship for the child under US law; however, this is more precisely described as birth tourism. Sometimes the term jackpot baby is used interchangeably with the term anchor baby. Both terms are considered pejorative by the pro-immigration activists but at least the latter term is considered by others to be non-pejorative and fully descriptive of the nature of the children born in the U.S. of illegal parents.