Jeb Bush Clarifies “Anchor Baby” Derogatory Comment, Challenges Political

“Of course we were horrified that they would start, framing the entire, you know the Asian American community using the derogatory term of anchor babies“, said Christine Chen, Executive Director Asian & Pacific Islander American Vote. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” earlier Monday, he said of Bush, “I think it’s great that he’s going to the border because I think he’ll now find out that it is not an act of love”.

Bush also said most of those illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans, not Mexicans.

The former Florida governor’s newly added public event in the Texas town, which sits near the southernmost tip of the state, were created to paint a sharp contrast between his immigration reform agenda and the platform outlined last week by presidential rival Donald Trump.

“Mr. Trump doesn’t have a proven conservative record”, Bush said at a town hall in Merrimack, N.H., on August 19, 2015.

On Monday, Bush said that he supports the Fourteenth Amendment and that the term “anchor baby” should not be interpreted as an insult. So far, rather than presenting real conservative principle based ideas and policies, all Jeb has been doing is to play defense at whatever ideas Trump throws out.

“The debate performance scared a few people“, said Brian Ballard, a Tallahassee lobbyist backing Bush.

Migrants’ rights activists see the term as a slur used by anti-immigration campaigners to describe the babies of those who sneak across the border to give birth, gifting their offspring US citizenship and enhancing the parents’ legal status.

Bush’s comments come after the unveiling of Pew research data from 2010 which stated that of 340,000 babies born in 2008 to unauthorized immigrant parents in the U.S., Asian immigrants accounted for 36 percent of the total births. But Bush said he wasn’t criticizing Hispanics.

Last week, after Bush used the term “anchor babies” to say he was concerned about some possible abuses of birthright citizenship, he came under fire from the left.

Since he’s positioned himself as the “grown-up” in the race, Bush can’t get that personal in his fights with Trump.

Still, it was Bush, not Trump, who took the brunt of the criticism from Asian-American lawmakers during a Tuesday press call set up by the Democratic National Committee.

“Governor Bush was highlighting that “birth tourism” is a well-reported serious and growing problem, one that the Department of Homeland Security has been grappling with addressing”, she said in a statement.

“There’s a dark side of politics that Trump’s appealing to”, says the senator. Its leaders allegedly recruited wealthy women on tourist visas from China who wanted their children born in the United States, so that their children could have U.S. citizenship. Never mind the years of subsequent warfare that destabilized Iraq, killed thousands and cost trillions of dollars during multiple recessions.