Bob, that all sounds very correct and high-minded. But realistically, how? Saying "we should" is meaningless when we are confronted with a big surge of desperate humanity.
It seems to me that the only way to stop the illegal crossing is to make it all legal. If we did that, we would have no national borders; people would just be free to come and go as they please. Maybe some day in the future, that will happen. Not in our lifetimes.
Nothing else would work, not even draconian measures such as killing anyone who tries to enter illegally. People would still find a way to do it.
But from all that I have read, immigration from our southern border has diminished considerably. The life awaiting illegal immigrants is not measurably better than the life they left behind. And economic conditions have improved in Mexico. This whole "caravan" thing is a bugaboo work of fiction, designed to scare up the masses to respond at the polls.
A week or so back I suggested folks in the US should read about how some of the most permissive of the Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and others have responded to far too much immigration and how they do slow it down. I suggested Denmark as it has done some pretty much to end immigration efforts.
When folks have their money over a certain level taken to help pay for immigration costs. When actually entered and accepted they can not call in family for at least two years. They must learn the local language, they must not attempt to force their ways on the communities. The Danish eat pork so they will not remove it from school menus to please the immigrants. On and on they do what they can to support their own ways of life and insist the newcomers adapt to the Danish life.
I believe also that the US should look to the ways others handle immigration and follow suite. Don't take my word for these actions. Look they up on the web.
Here is an example.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/denmark-refugees-immigration-law/431520/
We are way to easy on the immigrants that think crossing the border is just dandy so now you can feed me, medicate me, provide housing, and even provide a car for us. We need the wall completed and our border patrol should be allowed to block their entrance at the borders.
They need to use our legal way of starting at a consulate and get invited in.