The point seems to be the usus of the word "refugee."
It's a fairly common trope outside of certain circles. When does refugee status end? Can one be born a refugee? If you're a child refugee, is your grandchild a refugee?
In certain circumstances--okay, one--your grandchild or even great-grandchild is a refugee. In all others, you stop being a refugee during your lifetime.
The tacit point is that in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, and Egypt citizenship has been denied to Palestinian refugees and their descendants for political reasons ultimately rooted in racism and a view as to the appropriateness of Jewish control of much of Palestine; and with that denial went employability, the franchise, and numerous other rights the denial of which we find reprehensible. In the case of Syria and Lebanon the decision was also overtly political, in that Syria was Alawite controlled and having even a greater percentage of Sunni citizens would be a ethno-religious problem; and in Lebanon the political system was set up based on confession, that is, along denominational lines, with 1/3 of power going to Xian, Shi'ite, and Sunni politicians in a purely identity-based way--with the problem that not all groups had the same fertility rates, so that some out-reproduced the others. However, an influx of Sunni Palestinians in Lebanon would have upset the confession cart and explicitly defied the fiction that the three groups were evenlyr represented, forcing more representation to be given to Sunnis. There's a reason Lebanon hasn't had a census since before I was born (and I'm no spring chicken)--and, in fact, when my parents weren't yet in elementary school.
That said, I've known many people who said they were refugees in the US. Many had been here 10 or 20 years--some far more. One was a Nazi death camp survivor. Others from the USSR or eastern Europe. Some from Vietnam or Cambodia or Cuba. But the relevant thing, the semantics that matter here, is in the tense, based on time relations and not sequence of tenses rules in English.. Not a one that had been here and given up hope of going home claimed they were still refugees. Even if they'd just been here for a year or less and I was helping them learn English because their Cambodian or Spanish or Russian wasn't enough.
= new reply since forum marked as read