During a recent appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, Charles Krauthammer criticized Obama's worksite immigration enforcement strategy and proceeded to solve the illegal immigration problem, which, he explained, is “not rocket science”:

KRAUTHAMMER: We know what to do. You build a fence.

O'REILLY: All right.

KRAUTHAMMER: You build a fence; you stop new immigrants. If you don't do that you're not serious. It's not rocket science. It's real simple.

O'REILLY: OK. Charles Krauthammer, everyone.

Watch it:

Indeed, as Krauthammer's own network has repeatedly shown, when migrants who have travelled miles upon miles on foot through the desert come to a fence, they cut their losses and go home:

At Fox News, and other cable networks, incessant b-roll footage of migrants scaling fences is a fundamental element of the immigration coverage. (They evidently don't have any video of the other 45% of undocumented immigrants who entered the states with visas and overstayed.)

If Krauthammer truly believes that a fence will “stop new immigrants” in the absence of broader reform of an immigration system that is almost universally recognized as broken, then he should really sit out any public discussions of immigration policy. As economist Gordon Hanson has explained:

Not only do unauthorized immigrants provide an important source of low-skilled labor, they also respond to market conditions in ways that legal immigration presently cannot, making them particularly appealing to US employers. Illegal inflows broadly track economic performance, rising during periods of expansion and stalling during downturns (including the present one). By contrast, legal flows for low-skilled workers are both very small and relatively unresponsive to economic conditions.

And as noted policy wonk George W. Bush stated:

BUSH: I would remind people that you cannot fully enforce the border so long as people are trying to sneak into this country to do jobs Americans aren't doing. You can try, but doesn't it make sense to help the Border Patrol do their job by saying, “If you're going to come and do a job, there is a legal way to do it so you don't have to sneak across in the first place?”