I arrived in Virginia just outside the Beltway on a hot July day in 1991. It was 104 degrees and humidity I’d never encountered lay as a blanket over the region.

I’m an immigrant.

A luxury version – I did arrive on business class – but nevertheless an immigrant. At the time, I was married to another Dane and it was the pursuit of his academic dreams that led me over here. I was a reluctant immigrant, you could say, perhaps not as impressed by American culture as many are.

But here I am, 15 years later, living and working and enjoying this country more than ever.

So, of course, I’m following the immigration debate closely, and the more I hear about fence building and Minutemen posses, the more I’m convinced that the debate is missing a very important point.

Let me explain. During the time I didn’t have a green card, I was offered plenty of jobs, but I never accepted one.

It took seven years and cost thousands of dollars in application fees for me and my spouse to get green cards.

We submitted to question after question more personal than anything you’d ever want to answer.

I was photographed and fingerprinted (all 10), and I passed a most intimate medical exam – including an AIDS test – that’s now part of my file with the federal government.

So I’m legal, but I am not a citizen.

That means I can’t vote, but I pay taxes like everyone else, donate to the food bank, spend my money at the mall, own a house and a car, and I try to volunteer an hour or two where I can.

Here’s the point I think we’re missing: There is one major reason why undocumented aliens come to this country and it’s because someone will hire them.

That is, an American will hire them.

And as long as Americans continue to hire undocumented aliens, I can guarantee you they will continue to swim the rivers, scale the walls, “overstay” on their vacation visas, hide in the trucks and “forget” to renew their student visas.

Why wouldn’t they? Regardless of where they come from, they often have absolutely nothing to lose.

Scaling a wall to get into Southern California, lining up in an alley behind a gas station and waiting for an American to come by and hire you for a day of landscaping, fruit picking, cleaning or packing is just a different commute to work.

I have talked to some of the Americans in Southern California who hire illegal workers as a more or less covert part of their business plan.

Why wouldn’t we, some of them ask?

These employers sleep well at night, adopting an “everybody else is hiring illegals for cheap, so my business is at a disadvantage if I don’t do it” attitude.

And that’s the problem in a nutshell.

If we are serious about cracking down on illegal immigrants, we need to focus on the employers of illegal immigrants, not just on the immigrants themselves. If it becomes a felony to be an illegal immigrant, let’s make it a felony to hire an illegal immigrant, too.

Doing so means we’ll have to admit we are enabling illegal immigrants because our economy depends upon their back-breaking work. And that seems to be a conversation nobody is willing to have; perhaps because it’s just too painful to admit that a part of the economy rests on the sore backs of people many blame for everything that’s ailing the nation.