Illegal Immigrants Clean Senate

If the U.S. Senate really wants to get rid of illegal immigrants then they should stop hiring them to do housekeeping.

Meanwhile, citrus growers in Lakeland are short of pickers, Orlando hotels need housekeepers and there's a nervous Honduran woman, here illegally, who has cornered the Senate's first Cuban-American in the basement to beg for a law that would let her visit her mother back home, then return to Washington and the job she has held at the Senate for years.

All of which is why Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., is overbooked this week, dashing from closed-door meetings with skeptical Republican colleagues to interviews on C-SPAN and Spanish TV to a Wednesday morning speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose members fret that a crackdown on the nation's estimated 11-million illegal immigrants - including at least 500,000 in Florida - will drain the U.S. economy of badly needed labor.