Quickies: About The U.S.-Born Children Of Illegal Aliens

     Most of the time my memory functions like a junk drawer, or perhaps a disorderly basement used for the indiscriminate storage of uncategorized items. When I reach into it, I can’t be sure what I’ll get. However, it also has an active mode, in which it tosses up interesting bits that bear some relevance to whatever I’ve recently been thinking about. It just presented me with one such item.

     The item is a curious legal term: estoppel:

     Estoppel is a legal doctrine that prevents a person from adopting a position, action, or attitude, asserting a fact or a right, or prevents one from denying a fact inconsistent with an earlier position if it would result in an injury to someone else.

     Now, that’s written in legalese, which makes it a challenge for most of us English-speakers to decode. For disentanglement, hearken to the late Louis Nizer, in his legal autobiography My Life In Court, about his participation in the curious case of John Jacob Astor, the man with two legally recognized wives:

     Astor [asserted] that the Mexican divorce decree that he had obtained against Gertrude [his first wife] was void, and therefore that he was still married to her and that Dolly [his second wife] was not even his wife. He imposed a counterclaim in which he took the offensive. He asked that the court annul his marriage to Dolly because of a prior subsisting marriage. Finally, for good measure, even if he lost his other contentions, he asked for an absolute divorce from Dolly on the grounds of extreme cruelty. So the issue was joined.

     We contended that Astor could not take advantage of the invalidity of the Mexican divorce because he had procured it himself and had asked Dolly to marry him on the strength of it. We invoked the ancient equitable doctrine of estoppel. One may not take advantage of his own wrong deed. He is estopped from so doing. [Emphasis added by FWP]

     Estoppel has many applications, as the citation from U.S. Legal goes on to detail. However, the moral rationale is uniform: The misbehaver must not be allowed to profit from his misbehavior.

     This might not bear upon the citizenship or lack thereof of the baby – indisputably as innocent as any party to the matter could possibly be – but it would defeat any contention by the illegal-alien parents that they’re entitled to permanent residence in the United States by virtue of having borne a child on our soil. One is forbidden to profit from one’s lawbreaking.

     Finally, to any readers Liberty’s Torch has in the United Kingdom: Happy Guy Fawkes Day! It’s always struck this revolutionary firebrand funny that our English cousins commemorate a coup attempt that failed, but hey, other places, other mores.