Should They Stay Or Should They Go?

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Senate foes of loosening the immigration law are not giving up either, despite the Judiciary Committee vote. As debate opened last week, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe gave a taste of what is to come when he offered an amendment that would solve the problem of insufficient border surveillance by adding more border guards, deputizing retired police officers to patrol the frontier and authorizing citizen militias to hunt and capture illegal border crossers. Inhofe argued that the conditions in which captured border jumpers are held--he mentioned the provision of sports facilities and good food--are too pleasant to deter aliens from crossing into the U.S.

In the end, drafting a law acceptable to both the House and the Senate would mean finding common ground in three areas, each of which presents political challenges and real-world consequences of its own:

•TIGHTENING THE BORDER

There is only one thing on which all sides of this debate agree: America needs to get tougher about controlling its borders. If there is any easy part to writing an immigration law, this is it. Every proposal before Congress calls for more border-patrol agents, more jail cells and detention centers for captured illegal immigrants, and new technology to enable employers to screen employees to ensure that they are lawfully in the country.

All those measures are popular with voters, although in practice beefed-up enforcement can create as many problems as it solves. When the Clinton Administration began patrolling the California border more closely in the mid-1990s, the illegal traffic simply shifted eastward--increasing tensions in Arizona and New Mexico, where illegal immigration had largely been tolerated.

And for all the cry for more scrutiny of the border, none of the proposals under consideration would accomplish nearly as much, experts agree, as getting tough at the other end of the pipeline--on employers--by enforcing the law already on the books. Immigrants will continue to come to the U.S. as long as they know they can get jobs. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act made it illegal for employers to knowingly hire undocumented workers and imposed penalties of up to $11,000 for each violation. But lawbreakers are rarely punished. In 2005 the government issued just three notices of intent to fine companies for employing illegal workers, down from 178 in 2000.

That may be in part because the number of federal immigration investigators dedicated to work-site enforcement fell from 240 in 1999 to just 65 in 2004, according to the Government Accountability Office. And what resources the nation's immigration police put toward enforcement were diverted after 9/11 to finding undocumented employees in security-sensitive sites such as airports and nuclear power plants--hardly the first places that illegal immigrants tend to look for work. On those rare occasions when employers are punished, the penalties are so small that they amount to little more than a cost of doing business. Both the Sensenbrenner bill and the draft the Senate is considering would increase sanctions and step up enforcement.

•ASSURING A LABOR SUPPLY