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If the penalty for hiring illegals is just a fine, it becomes a business decision. But if the penalty is jail time, illegal immigration will come to a screeching halt.

For those who have come here illegally, they might have a transition time to allow them to set their affairs in order. And then go back home and get in line with everybody else. And if they get in line and they apply to become a citizen and get a green card, they will be treated like everybody else.

It has become much more difficult to smuggle dangerous substances across our borders over the past three years, and this is creating real problems for drug traffickers.

Under many current state laws, minors who have been victims of trafficking are charged as criminals and go to juvenile detention as offenders.

Foreign nationals entering the United States illegally who are taken into custody by the Border Protection Corps or by State or local law enforcement authorities must be promptly delivered to a federal law enforcement authority.

We must send a very clear message that if you enter our country illegally and then you commit one of these offenses, you will be dealt with harshly and you will pay a heavy price for your conduct.

There should be a path to earned legal status for those that are here. Not - not amnesty - earned legal status, which means you pay a fine and do many things over an extended period of time.

We tend to think of human trafficking as a foreign issue, not something that could happen here in our own back yards. But it's a fast-growing problem in the United States, in every area, with no real defined demographic.

The United States and Mexico are trapped - economically, culturally, politically and because of drug crime - in the same continent.