I still get a kick out of the phrase, "criminalize illegal aliens."
Good post, by the way.
Step one is to shut off the border.
When you're in a flood, shutting off the inflow comes before figuring out what to do with all the water that's already there. All these "amnesty" or "guest worker" ideas, good and bad, are putting the cart before the horse. Build the fence. Build the wall. Put more personnel on the border. Then work with the ones that are already here.
As a largely-unrelated aside, the "entitlement generation" is the result of years of deliberate indoctrination in the belief that the state should be Mother and Father, and it isn't going to be easy reversing that.