By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, April 20— The apprehension on Wednesday of more than 1,100 illegal immigrants employed by a Houston-based pallet supply company, as well as the arrest of seven of its managers, represents the kickoff of a more aggressive federal immigration enforcement campaign intended to hold employers accountable for breaking the law, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said today.Saying the hiring by companies nationwide of millions of undocumented workers is often a form of organized crime, Mr. Chertoff, a former federal prosecutor, said the government will now attempt to combat the practice with techniques similar to those used to try to shut down the mob.

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.

By Geri Smith

Living south of the U.S. border can be a surreal experience. When I was in Tijuana recently trying to navigate a poorly marked main artery to return a rental car, I suddenly realized I was on the wrong side of the four-lane highway, heading toward San Diego instead of toward the Tijuana airport. Stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, I'd take at least an hour to get through the U.S. immigration checkpoint to turn around and come back to Mexico. I'd miss my flight.

esperate, I motioned to one of the dozens of street vendors swarming around the idling cars. "Is there a turnaround lane for people who're stuck here by mistake?" I asked. "No, you're out of luck," he said, lugging a 3-foot crucifix and leopard-print blanket for sale.

But a few minutes later, he came running back. "You're in luck!" he shouted. "There's a place up here where there's no fence and the curb is broken and you can do a U-turn."
Steady Flow. I won't say here whether I bent the traffic rules, but it occurred to me that the poorly designed border entrance is similar to our broken U.S. immigration policy. The U.S. doesn't have a sensible way to deal with the need for a steady flow of reliable workers to do jobs our citizens are no longer interested in performing.

As a result, millions of good, hard-working people end up breaking the law. And it's not just illegal immigrants who do so but also Americans whose businesses would fail without that willing workforce. We have a legal and ethical bottleneck that must be addressed -- quickly.

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.