The editorial board of the New York Times says amnesty is the “only long-term solution” for the immigration problem facing the U.S.

In an effort to push amnesty for illegal immigrants, The New York Times editors penned a piece directed at Republican members of Congress and the Trump Administration, claiming that a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants is the only viable option for the GOP-led Congress:

The takeaway is clear. While it has become politically expedient to malign and scapegoat immigrants, Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers across the country recognize that finding a way to excise them systematically from payrolls would have a crippling effect on several industries. The only long-term solution to this conundrum is returning to the bipartisan consensus that enabled the 1986 bill. This would require giving millions of undocumented immigrants the ability to earn citizenship, then developing a uniform system to verify employment eligibility, and more rigorously prosecuting employers who evade it. Barring that form of comprehensive reform, American taxpayers will continue bankrolling an expensive, heartless crackdown on immigrants for years on end. Meanwhile, employers will continue to quietly reap the benefits of immigrant labor while looking the other way.

The editors used former President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty legislation, which legalized some of the 2.7 million illegal aliens in the U.S. at the time, as a catapult for precedent to pass another amnesty bill.

Due to lacking of enforcement of E-Verify, which keeps employers from hiring illegal aliens, the editors make clear their position is that Trump should dump campaign promises and instead grant amnesty:

American employers continue to assume relatively little risk by hiring undocumented immigrants to perform menial, backbreaking work, often for little pay. Meanwhile, as Mr. Trump’s deportation crackdown accelerates, families are being ripped apart, and communities of hard-working immigrants with deep roots in this country are gripped by fear and uncertainty. As long as employers remain off the hook, a border wall and an expanded dragnet can only make temporary dents in the flows of undocumented immigrants.

While criticizing the Trump Administration for not enforcing E-Verify nationwide thus far, the editors do point out that Trump’s proposed budget for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) includes $15 million to do just that, but slammed it as “paltry.”

The editors claim that Reagan’s amnesty would have solved the illegal immigration problem if not for the lack of E-Verify.

“If all had gone as planned, the nation’s population of unauthorized immigrants would have remained small and manageable,” the editors wrote. “Instead, it ballooned to more than 11 million over the years, even as the government vastly beefed up border security and deportations.”

“The main reason: Employer enforcement has been spotty, giving rise to the institutionalization of a wink-and-nod approach to hiring unauthorized workers,” the editors continued. “The government has sanctioned and prosecuted relatively few employers, because proving that employers willfully hired undocumented workers is hard and because powerful industries have pushed back on initiatives to hold employers accountable.”

Though The Times editors claim to be concerned with the cost of illegal immigration to American taxpayers, they failed to mention the cost of amnesty. In a 2007 study, the Heritage Foundation found that such a program would cost American taxpayers at least $2.6 trillion at the time

On the other hand, the construction of a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico Border is expected to cost $10 to $14 billion. That’s a fraction of the $113 billion cost of illegal immigration burdening American taxpayers, as Breitbart Texas reported.

Immigration experts, like David North with the Center for Immigration Studies, have said that Trump’s border wall could be paid off entirely within less than a decade by simply shuttering programs which federally fund illegal aliens, as Breitbart Texas reported.

John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.