BOSTON -- We were eight Mexican peasants, one smuggler and me -- desperately stretched out in dirt furrows in the night. The Border Patrol helicopter with its huge searchlight kept coming closer. It stopped, hovered and turned the other way.

"Madre," whispered Pablo, who at 17 was the youngest among us.

We took off running, then crawling past a parked Border Patrol jeep that was so close you could hear the patrolmen as they booked a group they had caught. Finally, two hours after squirming under a fence in Tijuana, we were running down empty streets in San Ysidro, Calif., to a safe house and America.

This was in 1977, and I retell the story from my days as a reporter to make three points as Congress, with surprising speed, is on the verge of sending the president $600 million in emergency border enforcement funding.

One is that the border will never be "sealed," as some want. Two is that "enforcement first," which the Republicans are demanding, has already happened. Three, it won't stop illegal immigration until there is a temporary worker program and those already here have been legalized.

The funding provides for 1,000 additional Border Patrol agents and more drones, sensors, legal infrastructure and the like.

The bill will bring the total number of agents on the Mexican border to more than 18,200. Along the 2,000-mile border, that is nine per mile. Despite all the fences and advanced paraphernalia, some people will always sneak through, raising the question of how much more spending is worth it on top of the $10 billion being spent this year on the Border Patrol alone.

History is littered with the folly of fortress strategies of building walls, from the Chinese to the French. For that reason, the Mexican border was never intended by this or past administrations to be the only line of enforcement.

But partly because the Department of Homeland Security is poor at explaining itself, and partly because the Obama administration is squeamish in talking enforcement, few Americans appear to be aware of how the many pieces fit together in what is a "layered" strategy, and how effective it has become.

Over the last 15 years, the government has gained operational control over the Texas and California borders. That success is what has pushed most of the traffic into the Arizona deserts. The new funding will help plug that last gap.

Meanwhile, the old "catch and release" programs were ended in 2005. Instead of being given administrative violations, most crossers are now charged criminally, and jailed for an average of 60 days if caught a second time. This carries cultural shame for otherwise law-abiding Mexicans. More than 135,000 crossers have been prosecuted in southern and western Texas alone, which is a spreading deterrent.

The border has been expanded, too. The Border Patrol can search without a warrant up to 25 miles away, and in some cases up to 100.

In the nation's interior -- the Arizona hoopla aside -- state and local police are extensively collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on any immigrant who has been arrested for anything. Many local jails check every detainee against immigration databases, and all are expected to do so by 2013.

Since last year, every federal contractor has been checking all new hires against the ever-improving databases. Hundreds of other employers, who once got off with a wink, are now being seriously fined for hiring unauthorized immigrants.

Students, businesspeople and anyone who comes on a temporary visa are now rigorously screened abroad. Their fingerprints and photos are entered into databases. Under development is a congressionally mandated system to check that they have left.

More can be done -- on the border, and by implementing a biometric work card -- but the above are proven, working programs. They partly explain why the Obama administration will likely deport 400,000 people this year, and why illegal border traffic is the lowest since 1970.

Demanding more "enforcement first" is misleading, if not fraudulent. What is most needed now to make enforcement totally work is a temporary worker program that provides a legal alternative for businesses and immigrants -- and the legalization of those immigrants who came wrongly in the meantime. Then we will have true rule of law.