Interesting topic :-)

My opinion is that a government should have the option to deport immigrants to the country of origin. There should be stricter rules when it concerns people who have been living in the "guest country" for a longer period of time. So the longer you've been living abroad, the more serious a crime has to be before you can deport someone.

What happens when you have an immigrant with a serious criminal record or an illegal immigrant and you want to deport him or her? I think a government should be allowed to imprison such a person, but only for as long as there's still the possibility that this person will be deported. So when the INS is still talking to the embassy/consulate to get travel documents or when they're in the process of investigating the person's identity and country of origin, I think the government should be able to keep someone detained. If you release them, then they will disappear and become illegal immigrants (again).

In this particular case there was no possibility of deportation, because of lack of travel documents. You can't detain him forever and thus there's no other option than to inform him that he has to leave the country on his own and then you release him. As for the comment of the government "fixing their own travel documents" - that just makes me smile :-) It doesn't work like that...you can't dump people in a country when the government of that country doesn't accept them as citizens of that country. If that was the case, the whole world could "fabricate" documents and dump unwanted citizens in America stating they are Americans because this person said so :-)

If you can't deport them, you have to deal with them. And in this case you probably have to deal with him over and over again. Granted, not an ideal situation, but what can you do?