With the economy taking over as the No. 1 issue on the minds of voters, immigration has taken a back seat.

However, the immigration problem is still here, our immigration system is still broken and the tactics being used by our immigration authorities to crack down on undocumented workers are still being questioned.

With no immigration reform in sight, the Department of Homeland Security has been focusing on border control and employee-verification programs. But recent events are calling into question the effectiveness of some of the department's actions.

Case in point: the cancellation of the virtual border wall. The $20 million pilot program had to be scrapped because it is inefficient. The technology was supposed to detect movement on the border and transmit the information to Border Patrol agents so they could, in turn, go to the location and take whatever action they felt necessary.

But as it turns out, too much time elapsed from the moment the motion was detected to when the agents got the warning on their computers. So that idea - along with millions of taxpayer dollars - has gone down the drain.

The building of the physical border wall also has run into some roadblocks. There are lawsuits pending among those who refuse to let the federal government have access to their private land in order to erect the wall.

Aside from trying to prevent immigrants from crossing the border, Homeland Security is trying to catch the ones who do cross wherever they can, detain them and send them back to their country of origin.

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But in that effort, they also have had to face some obstacles. The Social Security verification plan to try to identify workers whose numbers do not match their names has been blocked by the courts.

And now a new study suggests that the plan could be very costly to employers and legal workers alike.

The study, commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, concluded that forcing companies to fire workers who cannot clarify discrepancies in their Social Security numbers could cost employers more than $1 billion a year.

On top of that, legal workers would be out as much as $37 billion in lost wages. That is because a mismatch in the name and the Social Security number of an individual doesn't necessarily translate into identity theft - it also could be the result of a misspelling, a change of name by marriage or an administrative or computer error.

The study projects that as many as 137,000 legal workers could end up out of work.

As of now, thousands of immigrants suspected of being here illegally have been arrested in raids all across the country. They are picked up either at home, standing on a street corner looking for a job or at their workplace.

The raids have led not only to protests and marches, but also to lawsuits by legal residents and U.S. citizens who claim to have been victims of racial profiling and who have not been able to show instant proof of their legal status since citizens are not required to carry it around with them.

Adding fuel to the fire, a New Jersey federal prosecutor brought new doubt into the debate on immigration by stating that being in the country without the proper documentation is not a crime, but a civil offense.

U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie made the statement in response to a question about immigration at a forum organized by the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey.

According to Christie, lacking immigration documents is not a crime unless the person was previously deported. Although there are many repeat offenders, the majority of those arrested in the raids are just honest workers trying to make a living.

If we recall, efforts by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., to criminalize illegal immigration in 2005 failed and only led to massive protests around the country.

Many of these attempts to fix the immigration problem by finding piecemeal solutions are like putting a bandage on a broken leg: It's not going to heal.

Our broken immigration system requires comprehensive reform in order to begin to function properly. The tactics being used by Homeland Security continue to polarize the country, terrorize immigrants and take a financial toll on an already weak economy.

So if Americans are concerned about the economy, they should take another look at how we are dealing with immigration.

Maria Elena Salinas can be reached via her Web site: www.mariaesalinas.com

May 5, 2008