Anchor babies

With the addition of Donald Trump to the Republican Presidential field, the subject of “anchor babies” has suddenly become more popular. Trump has threatened to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants AS WELL AS any “anchor babies” that may have been born here.

Even many Republican leaders think that he’s nuts, since it has been estimated that it would cost $285 billion to deport those 11 million people, not to mention the additional cost for 9.000.000 anchor babies. That fact hasn’t hurt his popularity with his base, largely composed of white supremacists, nor has it prevented other Republican candidates from “jumping on the band wagon”.

One of the best known “anchor babies” is Rafael Edward Cruz, who is better known as Ted Cruz.

It is commonly believed that Ted automatically became an American citizen upon his birth on December 22, 1970 because his mother was born in Delaware, but the truth is actually a lot more complicated than that.

Cruz’s mother, the former Elizabeth Darragh Wilson was apparently born in Wilmington, Delaware. So far, that means that any child that she gave birth to would automatically become an American citizen, regardless of where that child was born.

Ted’s father, Rafael Bienvenido Cruz was born in Cuba. In 1957, he left Cuba to attend college at the University of Texas in Austin by virtue of a student visa. The only money that he had at the time was $100, which he had sewn into his underwear.

He was able to obtain an exit visa from Cuba due to the fact that the family attorney bribed a Batista official to issue the visa. Due to the regime change in Cuba in 1959, he was granted political asylum in the United States following his graduation from college in 1961.

By 1970, he had remarried, and moved to Canada with his second wife, Elizabeth Darragh Wilaon. Together, they owned a seismic-data processing firm for oil dealers.

At some point before their son “Ted” was born, they both became Canadian citizens. As a result of the change in his nationality, the elder Cruz lost the student visa that had been issued by the United States. Although Canada DOES allow dual citizenship (as does the United States and 43 other countries) the privilege did not exist until February 15, 1977. As a result, Ted’s mother was a citizen ONLY of Canada when he was born - and so was her newborn son.

The family later moved back to Texas, where Ted attended high school.

The status of United States citizens is very broad, and reads as follow:

A person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years.

Due to the fact that Elizabeth Darragh Wilson had lived in the United States for at least 5 years before moving to Canada, her children technically would be America citizens. However, since Canada did not allow dual citizenship in 1970, neither she or her son would have been allowed to be citizens of both Canada and the United States.

In order to be a United States senator, an individual must have been a United States citizen for at least 9 years:

Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution sets three qualifications for senators: 1) they must be at least 30 years old, 2) they must have been citizens of the United States for at least the past 9 years, and 3) they must be inhabitants of the states they seek to represent at the time of their election.

Unless Ted himself became a citizen after moving to Texas, he is ineligible for the office of United States senator, even though he was elected to that office in 2012, a mere 7 years after his father finally got around to become a citizen of the United States. . Since he renounced his Canadian citizenship is August of 2013, he technically isn't a citizen of ANY country.

The requirements to be a United States President pretty clear cut:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.

Even before the United States became a country, the land from “sea to shining sea” has had a complicated relationship with its immigrants, including a man named Graham Nash, who wrote a song about his experience as an immigrant in 1972.

Twitter is an online social networking service that was started in 2006. As of May of 2015, the service had 500 million users, including Queen Elizabeth, who sent her first tweet on October 24, 2014.

So far, I have resisted the temptation to tweet other people, but recently became aware of a tweet that reminded us that Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant.

Steve Jobs was conceived in Syria in 1954, when his Syrian father and American mother vacationed there for the entire summer. Jobs biological father was a brilliant man, but his maternal grandfather hated him because he was a Muslim (sound familiar?). Since Job’s father and mother were not allowed to marry, and unwed motherhood was still frowned upon in this country, she moved to San Francisco, and gave her baby away in adoption proceedings.

Job’s adopted father, Paul Jobs, grew up on a farm in Germantown, Wisconsin, but later moved to Mountain View, California in 1961. Mountain View, incidentally, is the location of the headquarters of Google, which happened to be started by a Russian immigrant named Sergey Brin and an American named Larry Page. The currently technology CEO for Google is an immigrant from India named Sundar Pichai.

Although the firm started by Jobs (Apple) is the most valuable company in the entire world, with a capitalization of over $700 billion, Google (at a market capitalization of 336 billion) is still a pretty respectable company.

Paul Jobs and his wife Clara never attended college, and Jobs himself (like Mark Zuckerberg) never completed his college career. Zuckerberg, incidentally, was raised Jewish, but has since become an atheist.

The world’s richest man, Bill Gates, ALSO never graduated from Harvard, but his “alma mater” eventually awarded him with an honorary degree.

Like his adopted father, Jobs’ biological father (Adulfattah Jandali) also spent some time in Wisconsin, when he pursued a PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin. While attending school there, he was a teaching assistant to Joanne Carole Schweible, who would ultimately give birth to his son.

AS you are probably aware, Steve Jobs founded both Apple and NexTInc., and was one of the primary funders of Pixar, Inc.

The current CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, announced that he was gay in 2014.

Before Jobs married his wife Laurene in 1991, he and his high school girlfriend Chrisanne BRENNAN became parents to a girl, who they named Lisa. The Lisa computer, incidentally, eventually became one of the products offered by Apple.

Steve Jobs was raised in the Lutheran faith, but eventually converted to Zen Buddhism.

There are far too many Neanderthals in this country who feel that immigrants don’t contribute anything to our society, and there are also a lot of folks who looks askance at people who don’t practice their own particular religion.

There are ALSO a lot folks who look down on people who don’t have a college degree, or who have a different sexual orientation.

The examples listed above show how foolish those ideas are.

Donald Trump never spent ANY time in the military, but felt that his military-themed private college was as tough as Vietnam.

If he actually had had the balls to join the military, he most likely would have joined the Navy, since “anchors, away!” seems to be one of his main talking point these days.