Sunday’s New York Times featured an illegal alien sob story, emphasizing the cost and danger of reaching the US.

Readers learn that the Times’ hero of the story, Salvadoran Christopher Cruz, apparently spent $12,500 to reach America’s welfare offices, though the exact sum is not clear. That’s a great deal of money for a poor unskilled Central American which he obviously believes he can somehow mooch back in the wealthy United States.

Additionally interesting were facts about the big picture of people smuggling, in particular that “migrants paid $500 million a year to groups fueling violence and instability in the region.” That’s a lot of money going to cartels — no wonder they are so powerful.

Imagine if all that money and human energy were repurposed to reform in the home countries. There used to be revolutions in Latin America, but now it’s just easier for young men, like the 22-year-old subject of the Times article, to break into the United States to steal jobs and benefits from citizen taxpayers. Illegal immigration is theft.

True, Central America is a third-world hellhole, but all its millions of unhappy people cannot come here and spread the poison of lawlessness in this country.

To be fair, the United States has been unduly generous to foreign lawbreakers who can manage to stay legally or illegally, a policy that constituted a human magnet.

Below, President Obama’s deluxe Karnes Detention Center for illegal aliens included flat-screen TVs, a hair salon and brand new clothes — at a cost to taxpayers of $140 per day per foreigner.

So President Trump is correct to apply severe negative reinforcement to counteract years of Obama’s pampering of lawbreakers. But the Republican-run Congress is not serious about immigration enforcement, otherwise it would have enacted universal E-Verify.

Back to the New York Times article—note the communist-style entitlement felt by the Salvadoran who says, “They can send as many soldiers to the border as they want, but a people’s need and desire for a better life is stronger.”