Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ann Coulter writes in her Aug. 4 syndicated column:
Consider the story of one family of illegal immigrants described in the Spring 2005 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons:
"Cristobal Silverio came illegally from Oxtotilan, Mexico, in 1997 and brought his wife Felipa, plus three children aged 19, 12 and 8. Felipa ... gave birth to a new daughter, her anchor baby, named Flor. Flor was premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator, and cost San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, (Felipa's 19-year-old daughter) Lourdes plus her illegal alien husband produced their own anchor baby, Esmeralda. Grandma Felipa created a second anchor baby, Cristian. ... The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding. Flor gets $600 per month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. Cristobal and Felipa last year earned $18,000 picking fruit. Flor and Cristian were paid $12,000 for being anchor babies."
In the Silverios' munificent new hometown of Stockton, Calif., 70 percent of the 2,300 babies born in 2003 in the San Joaquin General Hospital were anchor babies. As of this month, Stockton is $23 million in the hole.
This anecdote comes from an article in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons by Madeleine Cosman, which is little more than a anti-immigrant screed. In the same article, Cosman forwarded the completely false claim that "in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted" by leprosy, but that there had been "more than 7,000 cases of leprosy" in "the past three years."
The anecdote quoted by Coulter and Cosman came from a Wall Street Journal article making the case that stricter border enforcement is causing the counterintuitive effect of more illegal immigrants choosing to stay in the U.S. rather than migrating back to Mexico. There's a lot of selective quoting going on to hide that aspect of the article, which, of course, isn't as pejorative as Cosman and Coulter make it out to be.
