But how else to explain the Honduran caravan migrant who managed to slip into the U.S. on Nov. 26 illegally and, surprise, surprise, gave birth to a new baby just a few days later? That's the story from Fox News :

SAN DIEGO – A Honduran woman affiliated with a caravan of Central American migrants has given birth on U.S. soil shortly after entering the country illegally. Customs and Border Protection said Wednesday that agents arrested the woman Nov. 26 after she entered the country illegally near Imperial Beach, California, across the border from Tijuana, Mexico. The woman was eight months pregnant and was taken to a hospital after complaining of abdominal pain. She and her family were released from custody on Sunday, pending the outcomes of their immigration cases.

Catch and release. Entrance ahead of all the other migrants waiting in line. No waiting in Mexico. No fees for applying for asylum. No penalty for entering the U.S. illegally. Is that a good deal or what? No wonder she made sure she slipped in, ahead of all the other migrants, getting into the U.S. under the wire. She had a deadline, she knew she had a deadline, and she made it.

And with the new baby, the good stuff for her has barely started.

With no education, no mastery of the English language, no salable skills, low literacy, and no father in the picture mentioned (maybe there is, but I doubt it, given the cultural values of the Honduran lower middle classes), she has no practical means of succeeding in America. Yet with that baby in tow, she's hit the jackpot. And she's done so without putting so much as a penny into U.S. coffers via taxes. Nor does she ever need to. Uncle Sam's banquet is spread.

Illegal aliens already get more than a thousand dollars more in benefits than legal Americans for starters. If she's coming in as an asylee applicant, she gets far more than just that. If she's merely a garden-variety illegal, she still gets the jackpot. The baby ensures that she will get a $94,000 lifetime welfare benefit package through her U.S.-born child no matter how frivolous her asylum claim may be, accepted or not. She gets cash and food benefits for the child, free housing, free medical care, and pretty much anything else she needs for free. Coming here illegally is a great deal for those in the market for welfare. And non-citizens, as recent reports have shown, are prodigious consumers of welfare.

The Trump administration has asked the Homeland Security Department to prepare measures to keep her, as a public charge, from accessing permanent residency rights, which is a reasonable stopgap measure, given the incentives to immigrate illegally. What it can also do is reinforce the border so that such crossings do not happen, something the president said would be done – and which never happened.

But what's really needed is for Congress to enact legislation to end birthright citizenship, to put a stop to this kind of system-gaming from people who have little to contribute here and who are trampling on both the taxpayers and the immigrants waiting to get in. Anchor babies are real, and this first one from the caravan isn't about coming to America out of love for the country. It's about gaming the system to harvest the free stuff.

Image credit: Frank Hebbert via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.