Trump has made his repeated promise to deport 20,000,000 minorities and foreigners a central feature of his campaign. What does Trump intend to do with them? History provides the key. And what history? The history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, when another great power, seeking a cheap way to victimize a large part of its population to benefit the majority race, also started a program of mass "deportation" of minorities, in order to provide its majority race with more land, more money, more of everything, at the expense of the others. There was a word for this: lebensraum, or "living space," the notion that the majority race deserved what it craved so much that it justified any abuse of those considered to be lesser humans. Hitler proposed to "deport" Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and eventually all other non "Aryan" residents of the Third Reich. The Nazis soon discovered that deportation was impossible; it was too expensive for Germany, and oth...
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Originally, the term didn't indicate the immigration status of the parents. Indeed, the "anchor" referred to the American-born offspring of Vietnamese "boat people."
HOWEVER . . .
The ultra-reactionaries have turned its meaning to "American-born offspring of immigration law violators, especially those churned out for the purpose of keeping said violators in the United States so they can leech off taxpaying citizens."
As Drum points out, "If anchor babies are basically a myth, then the term is obviously a slur. There's no reason to make up this name for something that never (or very rarely) happens except as a way of demeaning a class of people and appealing to crude xenophobia. But if it does happen, then it makes sense to have a term for it. Otherwise you can't even talk about the subject sensibly."
Since (a) having an American-born child is not a defense against being deported, and (b) immigrants use public services at a lower rate than people born in the United States, the reactionaries' idea of "anchor babies" is a lie and myth; hence the use of the term is racist.