OK....had to get off the net for awhile to make some calls.
Illegal immigrant accused of impregnating 10-year-old girl
By JAMES OSBORNE
The Monitor
"PHARR - Police said they are searching for a 21-year-old illegal immigrant accused of raping a 10-year-old family member and leaving her pregnant."
http://www.valleystar.com/articles/2006/05/26/local_news/local_news2.txt
Next Stop, Reality
Posted 5/26/2006
Immigration Reform: The Senate's bill looks too much like the triumph of hope over experience. It's still possible to produce a good law, but not without meeting the House at least halfway.
Get ready for the mother of all House-Senate conferences — as is only fitting for an issue that literally will help define America's future. The two chambers have now weighed in with their sharply differing plans for immigration reform, and it's safe to bet that both versions will have to go through a serious rewrite.
Compromise is not out of reach at this point. But both the House and Senate need to recognize that neither of the bills they have produced so far deals adequately with the issues at hand.
The deficiency of the House bill is straightforward: It doesn't offer a practical plan for dealing with the illegal immigrants now in this country. The bill passed Thursday by the Senate does touch all the bases — border security, workplace enforcement and provisions for legalizing today's illegals.
But the Senate bill has at least one flaw that can rightly be called fundamental: It avoids the key question of priorities — specifically, what parts of the reform plan must come first. What's more, this silence is intentional. The senators took up, and voted down, an amendment to delay the start of any legalization process until the border is fully secured.
The Senate also would repeat a mistake made in 1986 by sorting the population of illegals according to the time they have spent in the U.S. Those here more than five years would have a chance for citizenship; those here less than two years would be deportable; those in between would return to their home countries to apply for green cards.
As critics on both right and left have noted, residency time is hard for the government to verify and easy to fake with forged documents.
Between them, the House and Senate bills contain the elements of an immigration law that is both reasonable and enforceable. But to get one, the Senate will have to accept the enforcement-first principle followed by the House.
Not only must border security be first on any timetable, it must also be a condition for other elements of the plan to go forward. That will help ensure that it gets funded, and that enforcement gets more than lip service.
The Senate also needs to be flexible on the issue of citizenship, just as the House will have to bend on guest workers. Instead of a clear track to citizenship for millions of illegals, senators may have to accept some form of legal status that is less than permanent.
As for President Bush, he can get his wish for a reform bill if he shows flexibility. His "middle ground" speech has widely been treated as an endorsement of the Senate's approach. If he takes the idea of a "middle" seriously, however, he can't expect House Republicans simply to cave in. They have a point, after all: A law likely to be widely disobeyed is worse than no law at all.
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&issue=20060526