Control immigration at work rather than at the border

If the government is serious about cracking down on illegal immigration it will do more of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement did last week and talk less about spending billions of dollars to build walls and fences that would cover only a fraction of the southern U.S. border.
Federal agents swooped down on meat packing plants in six states, taking 1,200 suspected illegal workers into custody.
It is not the first time that immigration agents have enforced laws that prohibit the hiring of illegal aliens, but it was one of the most dramatic. And it affected one of the nation's largest food-processing corporations, Swift & amp; Co.
The next step
Coupling the arrest and deportation of the workers with the prosecution of company officials who developed policies that facilitated the hiring of illegal workers would go a long way toward removing the incentive for illegal immigrants to come to the United States.
At the same time, it will test the claim that illegal workers are only coming here to do the jobs that Americans are unwilling to do. That claim, by the way, may have more than a kernel of truth to it.
And it will challenge Americans in the place they least like being challenged, in their pocket books.
If packing houses and poultry plants, hotels and restaurants, farm fields and construction sites are swept clean of illegal immigrants, employers are going to have to fill hundreds of thousands of job openings. To do that, they're going to have to pay higher wages, and the higher cost is going to be passed on to consumers.
We will soon see the depth of the commitment of the American people to cracking down on illegal immigration.
It is going to be up to Congress to gauge how much taxpayers are willing to pay and how they want to pay it: in taxes used to build walls and fences of dubious value or in higher prices at the cash register.