Canada has socialized medicine, which means overuse of non-essential services, and rationing of essential ones. As a result, at least a hundred women with high-risk pregnancies have had to come south of the Canadian border to get emergency free-enterprise medicine.

Of course, the babies naturally get dual Canadian-American citizenship as result of the circumstances of their birth, (and the current misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause) but they go right home with their mothers, assuming, God willing, that both mother and child survive the high-risk birth. [Canada's U.S. baby boom| With neonatal resources stretched thin, more and more high-risk infants are sent south to find a bed, By Lisa Priest, Globe and Mail, May 5, 2008]

Possibly in twenty years from now, the child will come back to the United States to work, and not need a Green Card, but that's about it.

James Taranto [Send him mail] is trying to be funny about this in the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web:

Aw, look at the cute little Canadian babies! It's all very sweet and innocuous, right?

Don't believe it. Read between the lines, and you realize this is a sinister Canadian plot to take over America. Canada's military is no match for ours, so the crafty Canucks are using infancy instead of infantry to carry out their imperial designs.

Think about it. Canadian officials send women across the border, smuggling in "anchor babies" cleverly disguised as clumps of tissue. The women give birth inside the U.S., which means their Canadian offspring are entitled to U.S. citizenship. As these "children" grow and mature, they receive instructions from their masters in Ottawa about how to undermine American culture.

Before you know it, your kids are stuffing themselves with litres of back bacon, downing kilogram after kilogram of Crown Royal and Labatt Blue, and belting out "God Save the Queen" as they watch hockey on TV.

It's all so horrible to contemplate, but it can be stopped. All we need to do is make America as inhospitable as Canada for expectant Canadian mothers. Hillary Clinton has the right idea: The U.S. needs socialized medicine.

This, for those not familiar with Taranto's open borders advocacy and heavy-handed attempts at humor, is a satire of "nativist" concerns about Mexican immigration. Now, I could say that the main problem with Mexican immigration is that they're not Canadians, but that's not the most obvious thing here—the most obvious thing is numbers.

• The Canadian women are in the US for an average of 26.6 days—Mexican illegals are here for life. And they take over whole towns.
• The Canadian government is paying the women's medical bills—the Mexican government is paying nada.
• The Canadians' children are going home with their parents—the Mexicans' children tend to stay, even if their parents are deported.

And the final big difference:

• Approximately 100 Canadian babies going home with US Birth Certificates tucked into their blankies—up to half a million illegal immigrant anchor babies whose parents came from Mexico and similar places.

Those kids are staying, and they'll cost the US Taxpayer a lot of money.