Punish real culprits for illegal immigration

Sometimes the most important thing you hear is the sound of silence.

Amid all the anguish over illegal immigration for all these years, one straightforward cause has been carefully ignored. For all kinds of reasons, both good and bad, illegal immigrants come here for jobs and find them readily. If the businesses that employ them were stopped — really stopped — the immigrants would mostly stop coming.

If the managers and executives in agribusiness and the construction, food-processing, lodging and restaurant industries faced 10 years in federal prison for hiring illegal aliens they would stop doing it.

But the managers and executives occupy a privileged position, so instead we pay armies of immigration agents, build big walls, argue over what to do with families who may be split apart, and elect bloviating leaders who misrepresent the situation and make false promises about fixing it — and the problems go on and on.

This story was originally published April 7, 2017 at 3:14 PM with the headline "Punish real culprits for illegal immigration."