This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 7th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Immigrants provide a steady source of talented and dedicated workers, the terms under which they arrive and

work charged the debate about how to handle illegal immigration.

Stuart Anderson is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and executive director of the National

Foundation for American Policy. He edits Cato's Immigration Reform Bulletin. We spoke

following a Capitol Hill briefing on immigration held last week.

I think the biggest mistake that members of Congress are making today is the belief that

you can secure the border only through means of immigration enforcement.

And what that means is that the current prevailing view for many members of Congress

is that if you continue to increase the Border Patrol

enough and build more fences and possibly add more sanctions against employers or otherwise make it harder for people

to get to be able to get work in the United States if they're here illegally, that that alone would be able to end illegal immigration.

But what we really know is that you need some type of market mechanism and the easiest one is

having legal visas available.

So if someone at the lower end of the skill spectrum wants to work in a hotel, a restaurant or other type of hospitality or construction sector that and there's an employer that's willing to hire them instead of them being hired illegally as is often the case today they would instead be hired legally.

That would free up a tremendous amount of resources at the border and elsewhere, and it would actually result in a much more secure border than we have today.

There was a question at the briefing that dealt with,

there are a lot of jobs that Americans just don't want and

the suggestion came up that there be some sort of government-appointed body that

would then be placed in charge of determining whether or not

certain job categories simply didn't have enough Americans

desirous of those jobs that would trigger allowing immigrants to come in the United States

...