Throughout campaigning for the upcoming 2016 election, republican candidates, namely Jeb Bush and Donald Trump, have thrown around the derogatory and pejorative term “anchor babies” when referring to U.S.-born citizens with illegal immigrants as parents.

Trump generalizes illegal immigrants as lazy and dangerous criminals with malicious intent and has therefore extended his beliefs of illegal immigrants onto their innocent children who were born in the United States. Trump wants to bring an end to these children’s “birthright citizenship,” granted almost 150 years ago in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens.

The idea behind “anchor babies” is that parents immigrate to, and have children on, United States soil with the sole intention of using those children as “anchors” to grant their own citizenship. It is also believed that the immigrants have children in order to receive public education and social services through their offspring – which is nonsense, considering the fact that these benefits are only given to the children by law.

Anchor babies are a myth.  According to The Washington Post, parenting a U.S. citizen rarely translates to a successful defense in immigration court.  It also leads to facing the exact same chance of deportation as any childless person illegally living in the U.S. In 2013, 72,000 parents with U.S.-born children were deported, according to The Huffington Post.

The only way that these parents can obtain citizenship is on their child’s 21st birthday, theoretically at least. In the meantime, they would have to return to their home country and leave their child behind. They would then have to wait in misery for their child to go through the lengthy application process for a family reunification immigration request and be cleared by the U.S. State Department with a background check. This background check would most likely show that the person had lived in the U.S. for longer than the legal 180 days, which would add another three years on how long he or she could reenter the U.S. That’s 24 years to wait to be a legal citizen in our country. A place of “freedom and equality.”

Although the anchor baby idea is completely fictitious, parents of U.S.-born children should be granted citizenship. If an illegal immigrant is caught and deported, his or her children are kept in the U.S. and put in foster homes, left parent-less and lonely in an unforgiving world.

Although Trump wants to rid our country of immigrants, we realistically need them. Immigrants are willing to perform jobs that many Americans are unwilling to do, at a wage that many Americans are unwilling to accept.

Let parents stay with their children in our country. Welcome them with open arms. Give them jobs. Boost our economy. And most of all, stop using the term “anchor baby” to insult a huge percentage of our country’s legal citizens.