Reply #92: I didn't say anything about morality...

[heliarc]

but since you asked... I think that human rights are just as important as civil rights. Whining and moaning about how this person was an illegal immigrant and committed a crime is besides the point. I'd love to see your figures on how crime of this kind is worse in other countries, or that crime committed by illegal immigrants surpasses crime committed by Americans.

Since you asked. There is a moral obligation to provide for the successful rehabilitation of oppressed Native American populations (of whom the Mexican Population shares a history) who have found themselves caught in a desperate struggle to provide for their families and live lives of comparable equality to their european transgressors. A desperate struggle that US industry exacerbates by knowingly hiring illegal immigrants en masse for Agricultural, meat packing, service, and food preparation and then blaming the immigrants for the problem. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand, except that there are quite a few people participating in the thread who apparently don't feel that a common understanding of dignity and "human" rights should translate into a respect for any foreigner on a shared plane...

Civil rights enjoyed by americans are denied foreigners, which I see as an insult to my own understanding of how humanity should measure itself. I don't see myself as any better than anyone else on this planet because I'm American. I really don't, and I believe that any truly moral or ethical metric wouldn't gauge someone's worth by where geographically they were born or by their nationality. (Though sometime I think I'm in the minority when I hear people who support the Iraq war mourn the loss of 4000 Americans while they shrug off the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis)

I have a BIG problem with the way in which INS goes so far as to deny Illegal immigrants many of the rights we enjoy as Americans, simply because they are not from the US. There are quite a few cases where the disrespect for human rights has gone so far as to separate children from a parent whose American spouse had passed away. The logic of cases like this or of cases where immigrants on the border are mistreated/raped/killed/beaten etc is insane. In my humble opinion, and I'm sure that I will be flamed for this: I believe that Agents of the US government should be forced to treat Immigrants as American citizens until they are deported. We have high standards for our own rights and I believe that those high standards shouldn't just include citizens of the "US." We have high standards because we respect our own humanity. Last time I checked there wasn't a US Patent on "humanity"

That being said, I think the rape and neglect concerns here are the most important issues. The illegal status of the assailant is just a silly side note that is posing as the most important problem.