Seriously, the immigration problem has a conceptually simple solution: get rid of federal minimum wage and the welfare state. Everything else will lose just like the war on drugs and prohibition. It's not just a US problem, the USSR even with the NKVD couldn't stop black markets. Incentive driven mass behavior is more powerful than any enforcement.
Look, I completely agree with you on getting rid of any federal minimum wage and the bloated welfare state, but how does that preclude what
@Scottty suggested? You keep coming back to this binary, where someone is either a citizen or an illegal alien. It's completely possibly to create a non-binary categorisation.
1. First, do just as you suggested, and get rid of the federal minimum wage and the welfare state. Great.
2. Additionally, I'd propose legalising all drugs, too -- not because I'd advocate drug use, but (as with alcohol prohibition), the prohibition of drugs essentially just means you make the cartels strong. Legalising drugs makes them cheap, meaning the cartels go broke, and ends the danger of tainted & poorly-refined drugs. Without the welfare state, junkies can't leech off the public, and with drugs now cheap
and no 'minimum wage barrier' keeping them jobless forever, the vast majority will not have to resort to crime to get a regular fix. At least as important, though: if you bankrupt the cartels in this way, South America benefits enormously (crime goes down + they can grow and export cocaine
legally). This reduces the amount of illegal migrants!
3. Now we get to the additional step. You make it pretty easy for migrants to become
non-citizen residents. They enjoy all the rights any citizen does, with the exception that they cannot vote and cannot hold public office. Now, the remaining illegal migration vanishes, because
legal migration is made easy. But the considerable numbers of migrants hat will now appear
can't just start unduly influencing politics.
4. It's still possible for non-citizen residents to become citizens, but
that takes some extra effort, so "citizen" becomes a merit-based class for newcomers. This ensures that forever after, only the most dedicated migrants enter the citizenry, and thus the body politic.
It seems obvious to me that this would address all major issues involved, and create a stable and naturally meritocratic system.