answer:I increasingly dismiss a lot of what is called political correctness today. Maybe it’s that I’m just getting older and resistant to change, but I sometimes find validity in my argument. Until I tapped into US news last week, I had no idea that the term “anchor babies” was now considered an epithet, and even worse, used as an argument over semantics by our presidential candidates to avoid discussing other, more urgent, national issues. Since nobody here can come up with an alternative to this term, why not just co-opt it, make it into something positive. Through usage in proper context, give it the connotation I believe it deserves. I wonder how many Americans citizens living in the States today came from anchor babies? I did. My father’s maternal grandmother was a Jew born in Baltimore in 1859. Her father and mother came from Russian stock, of the Ashkenazim. They fled the Tsarist pogroms – the attempt by the Russian government to eliminate the Jews from their lands—executed most efficiently by the brutal Cossacks, a formidable cavalry, expert at killing, that would ride through a shtetl shooting and putting Jews to the sword at random, loot it of any objects of value, then burn the village to the ground ensuring it would be erased forever from the earth. Cleansing, theyh called it. Through family connections, my great-great grandparents were smuggled into the States via Canada where my great-grandmother was born less than a year after their arrival in Maryland. She married a young German gentile, a Catholic ship’s boiler maker who’d jumped ship in Montevideo in order to avoid Bismarck’s military draft for the Franco-Prussian War. He’d done a short stint in the Imperial infantry before becoming a merchant marine and had had enough of the military – and Bismarck’s voracious adventurism in places like Denmark and Schlesvig-Holstein. He got on with a ship to Baltimore and soon was employed as a boiler maker with the B&O Railroad. He married the Russian girl and because he was a gentile, she became persona non-grata with her family. Later when her children married Catholics, she was marginalized because of her ethnicity by most of her extended, new family. Her parents received American citizenship because that girl was born on US soil. He remained an illegal all his life from what I can determine. All their children were anchor babies. He ended up owning one of the largest rock quarries on the Chesapeake. Many of the government building in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and most of the slate steps one sees attached to the stoops of the thousands of row houses in these cities came from his quarry. It was his good American progeny— seven sons and two daughters—who partied with the Washington elite of their day, drank shiploads of champagne and whiskey and gambled all their father’s hard-earned wealth away until the family were not able to weather the Great Depression without selling the quarries off for a song. I consider as anchor babies the Kentuckians in my family history who settled in Texas to raise cotton and cattle while it was still a province of Mexico. If I dig, I’m positive that I will find other anchor babies in my family line. I’m very proud to come from these people. In the past, when my world has turned to shit, I remember them and their trials and it gives me faith that I can persevere because these extremely tough immigrants’ blood runs in mine and they would consider many of my troubles trivial compared to the challenges they had faced. I’m extremely proud to be the progeny of anchor babies. I think those of us who are should be as well and should consider it a badge of honor as I do. They alternative is to allow this term to be relegated to that vast cache of epithets available to the bigots of this world. It think we should use it and use it often as a positive descriptive of those great illegals many of us come from. I wonder how many Americans that could be?