By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

Immigration agents arrested seven executives and hundreds of employees of a manufacturer of crates and pallets Wednesday as part of a crackdown on employers of illegal workers.

PHOENIX - It's a topic often lost in the heated battle over whether to add more border patrol agents, build a bigger fence, or deploy the US military along the border with Mexico. But in the end, most analysts agree, the United States can't stem the flow of illegal immigrants until it resolves to do one thing: punish employers who hire them.

Current law provides for sanctions against such employers, and legislation now under consideration in Congress would stiffen employer penalties.

The tougher provisions are not lost on companies here in Arizona, which now has more illegal immigrants crossing its border than any other state and which owes its decades-long growth spurt in part to a huge workforce - at least 12 percent - of undocumented laborers.

But federal enforcement has long been so weak, and employer fines so few and far between, that many here still laugh off the prospect of serious sanctions - though the laughs are a little more nervous now.

Are added `get-tough' measures merely tools to get Senate's OK?

By Frank JamesWashington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The sweeping immigration bill the Senate will tackle upon its return to Washington next week has been hailed as a compromise that marries tough border enforcement with humane treatment of illegal immigrants.Yet it contains provisions that immigration experts, and even many lawmakers, say are highly unrealistic, and that were inserted largely to placate tough-on-immigration senators and win enough support for passage.

Roughly 12 million illegal immigrants would have to pass background checks before receiving immigration papers under the bill. But a federal government bureaucracy already struggling with its workload would perform the checks, and experts say these new demands would overwhelm the system.

In addition, undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for two to five years, no matter where they live, would have to travel back to a port-of-entry on the U.S. border, such as El Paso, Texas, and go back across the border to apply for guest-worker status. Upon performing this so-called touchback, these several million immigrants could immediately return to their U.S. homes.

To experts who have followed the immigration debate, these examples demonstrate that lawmakers have tossed practical considerations aside to craft a compromise that could pass the Senate. The result is a bill that seems as much an exercise in legislative expediency as an attempt to reform the nation's broken immigration system.