Going to the hospital to deliver a baby can be a frightening, unsure experience for many young families. High tech machinery and medical staff in surgical gowns remind pregnant women and their partners that something, anything could go wrong. For expecting parents Naomi and Dustin Sykes, adding to this specter of uncertainty was the threat that their child, born early this week, could have been an illegal alien.
This is the family's first child, and it was really important for them that it was an American. Who can blame them? Nobody wants to spend time and money decorating the nursery with red, white, and blue, only to find that you need to change it for a baby who's from Brazil.
“Illegal aliens use many methods to get into this country,” said Representative Tom Tancredo, who’s also running for President in the hope of securing the votes of all those people in this country who aren’t related to immigrants. “They fly in, they hop over fences, their babies show up in our hospitals. If I become President we'll make sure the country of origin is stamped on every baby.”
“The doctors were hush-hush about it, said a radiant Naomi. “We asked for all the genetic screenings, but nobody could tell me if there was a test for illegal alien babies.” On inspection the small nursing infant looked American, but it would be hard to confirm without extensive DNA testing. The mother is so certain of her child's nationality that she named the baby John.
Mrs. Sykes' husband Dustin kept watch in front of her wife’s room at the hospital with a shotgun in his hand. “Just because the baby wasn’t born illegal doesn’t mean somebody can’t come here and make it illegal.” The hospital has an official no-shotgun policy, which Sykes was able to argue against since he was carrying a shotgun. “I don’t buy any of that DNA testing,” said Sykes. His biggest fear about an illegal child included that he’d have to take care of it regardless of where it was from. "They want to go to our schools and eat our food."
Illegal Infant Syndrome (IIS) affects a significant part of the diaper-wearing population. There are no obvious reasons that illegal babies could appear in American hospitals. Doctors use the convenient excuse that “the parents were from other countries.” Experts fear that physicians won’t address this issue because so many of them are immigrants as well.
Illegal babies enter this country every day, according to Lou Dobbs, a journalist familiar with this devastating syndrome. Dobbs could not be reached for comment as he was busy schtupping an undocumented Mexican cleaning woman in his office on Park Avenue.