Free Republic

OLYMPIA -- A state audit has questioned nearly $1 billion that Washington's Medicaid program spent last year -- including $75 million that may have to be repaid to the federal government because it was used for unauthorized medical services for undocumented aliens. Undocumented aliens received prenatal care, chemotherapy, kidney transplants and other procedures the federal government prohibits its money from being spent on, the audit released Thursday found. The report examined Medicaid payments in the fiscal year that ended in 2005. Medicaid, a joint state and federal program, spent $6.2 billion last year on health services for the state's poor...

Any guest-worker program approved by Congress for the nation's 11 million illegal aliens would spawn a new wave of cheap-labor illegals that already-overwhelmed federal authorities are unprepared to handle, law-enforcement authorities and immigration officials say. A former high-ranking U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) official said the federal government does not have an adequate post-legalization enforcement program to prevent an expected flood of fraudulent identity documents or sanction employers who hire the new illegals. "The new illegal aliens will be cheaper than the guest workers, and there will be nobody in the government to check up on them," said the...

There is a new kind of tree growing out west. Botanists have yet to decide how to classify it. Politicians and the major media seem to want to ignore it. The sight of one is enough to make weathered old cowboys who thought they'd seen everything in life break down and cry. Not many people have seen these trees, for they grow in out of the way places in the southwest desert along the border with Mexico. But those who have seen them are haunted by the memory. In an era of free trade agreements and politically correct euphemisms for...

President's Immigration Plan Unworkable Edward I. Koch Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2004 President Bush is proposing legislation to legalize the status of an estimated 8 to 11 million foreigners who now live and work illegally in the United States. The president’s idea is to turn these undocumented aliens into legal, tax-paying guest workers, with a right to participate in the Social Security system and to travel to their home countries on temporary visits. At the end of three years and a possible three-year extension, these guest workers would be required to return to their countries of origin and would be barred...