Free Republic

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Pedro Pablo slowly folds up his American flag blanket and stuffs it in his duffel bag. With it goes his American dream. "I left my family and lost four years with them. I will ask them to forgive me," he said. Pablo is an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who came to the United States to support his wife and five sons back home. When he arrived, construction jobs were plentiful. Over the last year, he says, he's worked three days. He recently boarded a bus with a one-way ticket home, paid for by the Guatemalan...

WASHINGTON: A top Republican congressional aide says the $800 billion-plus economic stimulus measure could steer government checks to illegal immigrants. Republican officials are concerned that the Democratic-written legislation makes people who came to the United States illegally eligible for tax credits of $500 per worker and $1,000 per couple. A House-passed version of the bill and one making its way through the Senate both disqualify nonresident aliens from receiving the credits. But neither requires a worker to have a Social Security number to get the credits. An economic aid measure enacted in February 2008 that sent rebates to most wage...

In an emergency room in Arkansas, the patient exhibits dark red boils, her skin numb. Another case of leprosy in America. Not far away, a tuberculosis-infected illegal immigrant coughs while on break at the local chicken processing plant – spreading his infectious germs across the break room table. His children, also carrying the disease, which had been all but eradicated from the United States years ago, join hundreds of children at the local public school. Crossing the Mexican border, in a pickup truck filled with “migrant workers” coming to “do the jobs Americans don’t do” in our fields and food...

Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services show that those in this country, and the county, illegally collected more than $37 million in welfare and food stamp allocations in November, up $3 million from September... for a projected annual cost of $444 million. "an alarming increase in the devastating impact illegal immigration continues to have on Los Angeles County taxpayers."