Korean parents of 'anchor baby' had long immigrant road

I was an "anchor baby." According to family lore, the day I was born at Hibbing Memorial Hospital in Minnesota in the early 1960s was also the day my parents received their deportation papers. They had come to America from war-torn Korea on student visas that had run out. Laws at the time prohibited most Asians from immigrating, so they were told to leave, even with three American children.

The 14th Amendment, with its guarantee that anyone born here is an American, protected my siblings and me from being countryless. Today, in the growing clamor over illegal immigration, there have been calls to repeal this amendment, with the pejorative "anchor baby" invoked as a call to arms. The words suggest that having a child in America confers some kind of legal protection that gives illegal parents, a foothold here.

But in reality, merely having a baby on American soil doesn't change the parents' status. As a so-called anchor baby, my existence did nothing to resolve my parents' situation; if anything, it only added to their stress.

In Korea, my father was a talented physician who also happened to speak fluent English. These skills led to his appointment as a medical liaison officer with a M-A-S-H unit during the Korean War. The assignment brought him to the attention of some American officers who, after the war ended, arranged for him and my mother to come to the United States so my father could continue his education. He ended up training with Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, a pioneer of heart surgery; my father was one of the first anesthesiologists in the world capable of administering anesthesia during open-heart surgery.

Other wartime contacts led to his job as an anesthesiologist in Hibbing, a northern Minnesota town that, because of its isolation and bitter winters, had trouble attracting doctors. My father was the sole anesthesiologist for miles, which meant that he spent long hours at the hospital, where he met with each patient the night before their surgeries and wouldn't leave until he'd answered all their questions. At home, a phone call during dinner — announcing springtime chain-saw accidents, appendectomies, emergency C-sections — often sent him rushing back to the hospital.

It wasn't until years later, when he made friends with another anesthesiologist who could cover for him — a German immigrant in Duluth, 70 miles away — that we could finally take a family vacation; until then, my father even had to be careful about drinking a beer at a cookout in case the hospital should call with another emergency.