There are plenty of regulations on the books to deal with illegal immigrant workers already and stiff federally mandated penalties for the employers of these folks, but .... they are rarely and selectively enforced. If a national push were put on by the fed to simply enforce the existing laws many of the avenues for employment of illegals would dry up in a hurry.

An interesting tid bit I recently learned regarding immigrant status in Mexico is that if a foreign national lets their legal immigrant status slip and does not renew it they receive a 10yr sentence for doing so.

In the US that "might" get the individual deported after an opportunity to renew their status is blanketly given out and they have still not complied with the letter of the immigration laws. This is of course IF they are ever put into the hands of the Fed judicial system at all, which is a pretty unlikely scenario to begin with.

Local and state jurisdictions don't communicate the immigrant status of those arrested to the fed, so a federal agency must somehow arrest the individual on a federal charge for that to ever happen at all, again ... highly unlikely !

Foreign nationals within Mexico are also not allowed to own businesses or real estate, unlike here where a business or property owners immigration status plays NO part in their right or ability to own property. If this area were addressed it would also have some impact on the illegal population.

It's actually a bit more difficult to address the illegal immigrants as tenants side of the issue as landlords typically don't have to report whom their tenants are and a new set of laws relevant to that issue would have to be implemented to get this accomplished. Such a set of standards would be hard to address, much less oversee.

I've said it before, but .... bring our troops home, man the borders with STIFF military support, lock down the immigration policies in place, stop playin the world cop card and take care of our own for at least a few decades. There's plenty enough issues within our own borders that concern the average American more than what's goin on 1/2 a world away.

Our public educational system is a sham and much closer to a national babysitting service, we have elderly/poor staving, dying and suffering from the lack of ability to maintain affordable health care, our once great capacities as manufacturing giants are mostly outsourced to places outside our borders leaving millions of workers (some highly specialized) left to find less promising work at typically lower pay and all the while we pump billions after billions of our money to other points across the globe. I say we need those billions and efforts focused HERE !!