>Oh I wasn't trying to denegrate you. I was just wondering what your take was on all this since I knew you were having to do battle with our illustrious government and the red tape. I thought the illegals might tick you off since you are going through the legal process and they are skirting it. I wasn't going to send INS after you!<g>

The whole question doesn't touch me personally - how many Fox programmers do you know who are illegals? - it's more of a pet peeve of mine, exactly about the red tape and disregard for these people's lives.

This red tape can put your life on hold for undeterminable lengths of time. Our oldest daughter, for example, waited for her green card for years, and one of the delays was about some form they sent her to the wrong address (though the notice that it was sent came to the right address), and then had to pay $190 for a copy. And this single glitch took two months. Now the card arrived and the postman didn't deliver it to the door (12 steps up the staircase) so it's returned, and would probably take a month to deliver again, with no guarantee that the delivery will succeed. Which means that for months after graduation she wasn't eligible to work - because INS took so long. But that's our family matter, I wrote this just as an illustration.

And what about illegals' children born here? These kids are, by definition, citizens. Would it be right to exile their parents?

Or, what would be the proper punishment for the businesses who hired illegals, if these are legalized? Should they pay the taxes, social security etc for these retroactively?

As you see, there's a lot of legal vacuum here, which was created by decades of porous border. It'll be very interesting to see how, and whether, will this be solved.