I don't understand the nature of this cause celebre and why they are any different than any other illegal immigrants. I know many Mexican illegals who are wonderful, hard working, sweet hearted people. They are STILL ILLEGAL. I don't care if they have hard-luck stories or if they sell American flags, American war bonds, or American chewing gum. If they have visas that run out, then they leave. That's the law.

Jpincus, you are right, that is the law. By analogy, if you rent an house and your lease runs out, and you haven't renewed it, you have to leave, that's the law. Right?

Well, yeah, but in most states if your lease runs out, and no one shows up to evict you, and you live there for 10 years, the house becomes your property, especially if you start paying taxes on it and living in it as the original owner would have. It's called adverse possession. Even if the original owner shows up in 10 years and 1 day, and claims the house is her house, so sad, too bad, the title has actually transferred.

I think we should have the same thing for permanent residency status. If you show up legally, or maybe even illegally, and you pay taxes and work and don't get into trouble and you establish your life here, with possessions and ties, and all that life comes with, the government shouldn't be able to deport you. These people, from an economic point of view, were very productive and valuable. Their children would grow up and pay taxes to support the social security of baby boomers, etc.

Similarly, you could make an analogous claim of green card by estoppel, which means, that if it looks like X, and smells like X and acts like X, but you never called it X, the court can actually say, it is X. This often applies in agency, property and contract law. So for example, if you use a part of your neighbor's driveway to back out of your garage, and the neighbor never objected, and you do this for a certain number of years, and then the neighbor wants to stop giving you permission, you could actually get an easement by estoppel. this means that even though you and your neighbor never called your little arrangement and easement, because it looks like an easement, and smells like and easement and acts like an easement, the court can create an easement by estoppel, which has the same validity as if you had negotiated the easement at the very beginning.

Similarly, we could do the same with permanent residency. If you live here, pay taxes, maybe even vote (it happens!), rent an apartment, etc., then maybe you should get residency by estoppel.

Just some thoughts on "it's the law."

Um, in response to your last post, have you ever heard of Rawls' "veil of ignorance"?

Right now, the people who have declared that they want to kill us are Muslims. Putting a huge curb on the number of people from those countries makes excellent security sense as we work as hard as possible to filter out those people who have murder on their minds from those who just want a better life.

So you're saying that because the terrorists are muslim, we should scrutinize people from muslim countries more carefuly. This is illogical for many reasons.

Te first set of reasons revolves around (beecause hijackers were muslim -> we must scrutinize muslims). Well, they were also all men, should scrutinize all men? Many of them were married, some had engineering degrees, one of them loved mash potatoes. Osama bin Laden was obsessed with Whitney Houston and Jackie Chan -- should we scrutinize people who match any of those characteristics? What if we find out that they all loved hummus? Do we ask at immigrantion if people love hummus?

The second fallacy is your contention that we should scrutinize people from muslim countries more carefully. Well, for one, many "muslim countries" have populations of non-muslims, like Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Bosnia, even Iran has 60,000 Jews. And many "non-Muslim countries" have large populations of muslims, like India, Spain, France, Germany, UK.

It seems it would be simplest to simply scrutinize everyone, instead of trying to figure out if they fit into any number of random groups we're trying to scrutinize.

First of all, it's still unclear as to whether the footage was fake. More interstingly, there also uncorroborated reports of Christians celebrating 9/11 in Lebanon. Isn't that bizarre?

Tonia,

It's nice that you support this family, but you seem to support them at the expense of hispanics. I daresay what you wrote about both was kinda racist. And btw, people aren't "Arabic," they're "Arab." Arabic is a language.

re: First of all, it's still unclear as to whether the footage was fake.

No it's not - the only folks to have claimed it fake were Palestinians and Muslim apologists - and probably a few who claim the whole thing is a fake. I saw the footage that day - and the cameramen who shot it were threatened with death - unless you think CNN is in on the conspiracy as well...

-- Man

Well, we're not going to get anywhere because we have conflicting sources, for the sake of argument, let's assume that some of them did dance in the streets (you can't possibly argue it was all of them). Does that implicate the Kesbahs somehow, considering they were living in the US? We have no evidence of them dancing in the streets, no evidence of any "disloyalty" (i hate that word so much). Or are you saying that it implicates them just because they're Palestinian? It's an interesting though, about as logical as "there were 16000 murders in the US in 2004, so that must mean you're a murderer, because you're american."