Target Jobs to Stop Illegal Immigration : Identity cards could be checked against a national registry of legal residents.

Two weeks ago in the dark of morning, he walked across the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, with several dozen other illegal immigrants from Central America. Their passage went undetected by Border Patrol agents who presumably had been outwitted by the “coyote” smuggling this 13-year-old on a furtive journey through Mexico and across the border. Jesus paid the man $2,900. The price and risk have gone up since politicians demanded a crackdown at the border.

Last week in Los Angeles, Jesus stared intently at Spanish-language news broadcasts. It could have been he who was clubbed or killed falling off a speeding truck. Why did he come here? The others were all adults looking for work to feed relatives back in their village where there was no work. Jesus came to see his mother.

It had been seven years since he had last hugged her, on the day she began a two-month trek to the promised land. For seven years, Maria had washed floors, diapered babies, hauled trash, anything to send money home to keep Jesus and the rest of her relatives alive. But never enough to bring Jesus here.

Finally, last year, she landed a “great” job. It paid $300 a week, much more than she had ever made before. The catch was that she could never leave the woman with severe Alzheimer’s disease who was in her constant care seven days and nights a week. The people who hired her to take care of their mother, who no longer recognized them, came by only occasionally with groceries. But the good news is that Maria was able to save the $2,900 to send for her son.

Jesus and Maria are the people that callers on talk radio call “scum.” More reasonable voices concede their humanity but say they should have stayed home. They claim that there are legal workers willing to take Maria’s job. Maybe so. But labor laws would have required three to replace Maria because of the long hours.

“And that’s one of the really good jobs,” says Jose Millan, assistant labor commissioner of California. “Try finding legal workers for the grape harvest in the Central Valley. Whole families live in cardboard shantytowns on the banks of the river and get up at sunrise to harvest grapes in the hot sun; it’s dirty, dusty and backbreaking work. All of that for the minimum wage.”

The only reason they are assured of the minimum wage is that Millan and his teams of inspectors have been out there enforcing the labor laws. He’s been at it for 10 years and estimates that 90% of agricultural, day labor and garment workers in California are here illegally. Millan puts the figure for restaurants at 80% and for domestic workers at 70%.

After a decade of bringing the law to the fields and factories, Millan knows that the real battle is not at the border. “They can put cops shoulder to shoulder and they’ll come in by boat or plane or some other way as long as you have an economic system that needs migrant workers to do jobs that Americans no longer want to do--so we should stop kidding ourselves.”

For the past three years, Millan, 41, a lawyer who grew up in East L.A., has run California’s pioneering interagency program that, in cooperation with the federal Labor Department, aggressively enforces labor, safety and health laws in the garment industry and agriculture. I have gone on a dozen raids with him and cannot understand why his program is not the national model for dealing with illegal immigration. The president should hire Millan and announce a major nationwide “war on labor exploitation,” with the states, to enforce minimum wage, overtime pay, health codes, workers’ comp and other laws designed to protect workers. Once we upgrade those jobs, we will learn if legal workers want them. If they don’t, then we should either raise the minimum wage to a living wage or grant more green cards in acknowledgment that this country lives off exploitable immigrant workers.

The ugly truth is that big growers and many business lobbyists want the illegal workers here because they are easy to exploit. Otherwise, Congress by now would have passed a law authorizing a tamper-proof identity card that all job applicants would be required to show. Employers would have to run that card through a national registry or face criminal penalties.

To be fair and effective, the law should apply to all workers, in restaurants, the fields or politicians’ homes. But business and agricultural lobbyists go ballistic every time the idea is brought up. So instead, we escalate those dangerous games at the border, including car chases that threaten the lives of citizens. How many more immigrants need to be beaten or killed before we come to our senses?