The Anchor-Baby Question at the G.O.P. Debate

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” Donald Trump said, about a dozen insults into his speech in Dallas, at the American Airlines Center, on Monday night. “But when a man has a problem, and he’s got his wife or his girlfriend, and they move her over the border for one day, has the baby on the other side of the border—our side—now that baby is a citizen of our country for however long the baby lives.” Perhaps sensing that the last phrase might sound a bit ominous, he quickly added, “hopefully, a long time,” then continued his immigration-as-paternity-suit-fraud riff: “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And by the way, by the way, the law doesn’t call that. That’s not what the law says. And people are finding out now that I’m right. We didn’t say that someone could be pregnant for nine months, come across the border, have the baby, and now it’s ours and we have to take care of that baby forever. It doesn’t say that. It does not say that.”