But despite laws such as Arizona’s SB 1070 that increased fears of anti-immigrant backlash, the number who reported experiencing discrimination remained nearly the same as it was in 2009, at about 33 percent. The number of Latinos who said they had been asked for papers actually went down a few percentage points, from nine percent in 2008 to five percent in the most recent poll.

While Latinos largely dislike laws like SB 1070 — 79 percent said they opposed it, versus 32 percent percent of Americans overall who opposed the law — and think immigration enforcement should be left to federal authorities, they differ on how the country should handle illegal immigration. Here’s a breakdown on what Latinos said should be done with undocumented immigrants already in the country:

Most Latinos polled said they disapprove of other enforcement measures such as workplace raids or more fences along the border. About half support the idea of more border patrol agents, though, and most said they would support a national ID card.

The poll also adds some interesting perspective to the debate over so-called “anchor babies,” or the practice of illegal immigrants coming to the country to have children who will be U.S. citizens. While 30 percent of Latinos said illegal immigrants come to the United States to have a child here, 64 percent said this was untrue. Republican politicians have said birthright citizenship creates an incentive for illegal immigration, and some plan to propose legislation ending the practice in their states.

For one thing, there are likely too many illegal immigrants in the U.S. to track down and deport all of them, as Obama said in July. ICE Director John Morton said last week Congress supplies enough funding to remove about 400,000 people per year.

These budget constraints mean ICE has focused in on deporting criminals and penalizing companies that hire undocumented workers. But these efforts, too, are imperfect, as The Arizona Republic reported today:

It’s not hard, experts say, for an illegal immigrant with high-quality fake identification to collect a paycheck. An undocumented worker could remain on a company’s payroll a few days or indefinitely, especially if he or she uses a matching name and Social Security number taken from a friend or relative, or stolen. [...]

Because the existing safeguards can’t stop every illegal worker, the risk of getting caught is the greatest deterrent for workers or employers who may want to skirt the rules.

The Arizona Republic also ran a useful chart explaining some of the loopholes of each type of immigration enforcement:

Many people have argued Congress should focus on enforcement before it can make other reforms to the immigration system. But as the chart shows, full enforcement of illegal immigration is next to impossible — begging the question of what level of enforcement will be considered sufficient to start tackling immigration reform.

For far too long, America failed to secure its borders. As a result, people failed to respect those borders and millions of illegal immigrants swept across. But efforts in recent years to restore the rule of law—such as building barriers and increasing prosecutions—are sending a clear message to the world. As a result, illegal border crossings are down. Statistics show that border apprehensions fell from over 1.6 million at the beginning of the decade to around 550,000 last year. This is a promising development, but the task of securing America’s borders is far from complete.

Actually, migration experts attribute the slowing if illegal immigration to the United States not to new barriers and prosecutions but to the recession, which has slowed the demand for workers. Still, prosecutions for immigration violations have reached record levels in the past few years. Napolitano’s pledge to focus worksite enforcement on employers who knowingly hire illegal workers rather than on the workers themselves has, however, disappointed Sessions.

Unfortunately, on the crucial policy of worksite enforcement, the administration is moving in the opposite direction. They have effectively signaled to our law enforcement officers that they should turn a blind eye to clear violations of the law. The no-match rule—a commonsense policy that required employers to take action if notified that their employees did not have legal status—has been brushed aside in favor of much more lenient administrative audits. Perhaps most perplexing, worksite raids no longer result in deportation, meaning that even if discovered, illegal aliens are allowed to walk free and seek employment elsewhere. This lax approach is particularly troubling at a time when so many American citizens are struggling to find jobs.

It’s not at all clear that DHS has not been deporting illegal immigrants arrested in workplace raids. Although Napolitano did say she’d focus her efforts on employers, as did the Bush administration, workers are still arrested during “workplace enforcement actions,” as Immigration and Customs Enforcement likes to call them. Some of those workers may be allowed to remain in the United States temporarily to act as witnesses against the employer, however, if the government plans to prosecute. That happened in the case of workers at the Yamato Engine Specialists Ltd. plant in Bellingham, Wash., for example. They are now again facing deportation.

Regardless, Sessions made clear that the treatment of illegal immigrant workers in the United States is sure to be a point of contention at Wednesday’s Senate hearing.

Secretary Napolitano is America’s top immigration enforcement official, and I look forward to discussing with her these and other important immigration issues. Her recent comments that our progress on border security opens the door to consideration of new amnesty policies are disturbing. That faulty view will be a focus of the hearing.

That should make this morning’s hearing interesting. I’ll be following it and will report back.

This tribute from Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, is a particularly moving one and seemed worth posting in full:

As the head of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition in Boston before coming to the Forum, I witnessed the deep personal commitment Senator Kennedy felt for immigrants and for fixing America’s immigration laws. After a devastating raid in New Bedford in 2007, Senator Kennedy and other leaders met with family members who gathered in the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church as hundreds streamed in. The families huddled around Senator Kennedy asking him for help finding parents and loved ones who had been taken away by armed federal officers.

Senator Kennedy did not want to leave that church basement. These were his people, these were the people he wanted to help, and these were the people impacted most directly by our broken immigration system. I saw in his concern for these terrified and shattered families Senator Kennedy’s personal commitment to righting wrongs when he saw them.

That afternoon, and in the days and months ahead, Senator Kennedy led yet another push for comprehensive immigration reform on the floor of the United States Senate. Each time he spoke, he went back to that moment in New Bedford to remind our country why we need to fix our out-dated immigration system. Fighting for the dignity and safety of immigrants who give their work and their sweat to this country was not an abstract policy matter for Senator Kennedy.

The great-grandson of eight immigrants to America, the brother of two of America’s most visionary leaders on fighting for a fair and just immigration system, Senator Kennedy was in his own right the architect of the modern struggle to honor America’s legacy as nation built by, populated by, and defined by immigrants from around the world.

We will miss his humor, his strategic sensibility, and his ability to keep us moving forward whatever the obstacles. He taught us that the fate and possibilities of all of us are fully intertwined with the fate and possibilities of the least of us. Both political parties and every American, regardless of status or station, can honor Senator Kennedy’s life and legacy by recommitting ourselves to making the United States of America the most welcoming, free, egalitarian, and successful nation on earth.

But it still doesn’t explain why the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, after promising to crack down on employers who illegally hire immigrants and treat them as slave labor, is going after a company that starts its low-skilled workers at $10 – $12 an hour plus health benefits — far above the legal minimum wage. The government hasn’t even alleged that the company knowingly hired undocumented workers, only that an audit of its records shows that about a third of the workers might not be legal and may have shown fake documents when they were hired.

If the workers can’t now prove legal employment status, they’ll be fired and possibly deported.

Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) encouraged the DHS to be “tough” on employers who hire illegal immigrants. But he seems ill-informed about just who those employers are and what they’re doing.

“If this is a truly conscientious effort to get tough with employers to say the days are over of profiteering with illegal immigrants, that’s fine,” he told Julia Preston of the Times. “But if the fine will be so low that it’s just part of doing business, there’s no deterrent.”

But it turns out American Apparel is not profiteering off illegal immigrants — just the opposite. It seems to be paying a fair and living wage and benefits to whoever comes to work there and can show proof of legal work authorization.

Technically, DHS can go after any employer it wants who may have hired someone with false papers. But targeting a model company providing low-skilled and immigrant workers a chance to earn an honest living wage doesn’t really seem to be the best use of scarce resources.

Sessions is known for being tough on immigration enforcement and a supporter of making the controversial E-Verify employment eligibility system mandatory. At today’s hearing, he challenged Napolitano on why some of the workers arrested during the Bellingham, Wash. raid in February were temporarily released and allowed to return to work, and why there haven’t been more large workplace raids since then. “I wonder if the agents unintentionally got the message” that you don’t approve of those raids, Sessions said to Napolitano, who quickly responded that  she will continue pursue worksite enforcement “very vigorously.”

Sessions was pleased: “I think it could have a big positive impact on the difficulties we’ve been facing with the immigration policies.”