Placing the U.S. military on the Mexican border is a knee-jerk reaction to a horrible tragedy. It didn’t work in 2008 and it won’t work now.

Despite the simplistic rhetoric and jingoism paralyzing American border policy, the problem of illegal immigration can’t be solved with walls, fences and soldiers.

The Chinese tried building a 2000-mile wall to keep out the Huns. It didn’t work. The Romans tried building a 120-mile wall across England to keep out the Celts. It didn’t work. The Soviets tried building a wall and fence around East Germany, complete with barbed wire, mine fields and machine guns to keep East Germans in East Germany. It didn’t work.

We have built 700 miles of walls and fences, deployed more than 8,000 Border Patrol agents, deployed hundreds of U.S. Army National Guard soldiers, built checkpoints on our highways, installed infared cameras, radar, ground sensors and used dogs and helicopters to stop the rush of illegal immigrants into this country.

We’ve done our best to turn our borderlands into something any North Korean or former Soviet Union citizen would recognize. But it hasn’t worked.

Doing more of what has already failed is a fool’s mission.

We must try something else.

The vehement and virulent attacks by a few angry people on American politicians who suggest any solution other than the militarization of the border and the expulsion of those already here illegally has stopped any rational discussion of other solutions.

They have demonized comprehensive immigration reform as “amnesty,” mischaracterizing it as a reward for an illegal act. That simple rhetorical flourish has galvanized public opinion against any solution that might allow those already here to stay, guest worker programs that would allow those who want to come here to work and then go home and other reasonable reforms.

But illegal immigration is a complex problem that requires multiple solutions.

The crux of the problem is that the American economy needs cheap labor and unemployment in Mexico is high and living conditions for the poor can be brutal.

We can’t keep jobs and the jobless apart. Despite spending billions of dollars on border enforcement and the worst American economy in 70 years, 500,000 illegal immigrants were caught by the Border Patrol in 2009, half of them in Arizona.

It’s hard to say how many weren’t caught but even the Border Patrol estimates that at least one gets through for every one caught.

We need a way for American businesses that need labor to hire people to do the work. And if no American wants the job, they should be able to look elsewhere and easily hire someone from another country without relying on an underground smuggling system and stolen or forged worker documents.

We need a way for those already living here as subcitizens to be able to come out from hiding and offered a chance to prove they’ve earned the right to stay without the fear of being placed on a bus and dropped off across the border in a country that has become alien to them.

If that’s amnesty, then it’s amnesty.

What we’re doing isn’t working and is expensive. It’s time to try something else.

Remember when there was a crisis on the border? You know, all the way back in 2007 when all anyone talked about was how to stop the invading horde and expel from the country the millions of pernicious illegal immigrant freeloaders?

Few public officials, other than Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and state Sen. Russell Pearce, even bother to bring it up any more, or hold town halls or issue shrill campaign press releases clamoring about all of the “illegals” destroying the country.

In President Obama’s recently released federal budget proposal, funding for border security stays roughly the same, the first time in years that it hasn’t significantly increased over the previous year.

He also will reduce the number of Border Patrol agents, albeit only by 180, or about 0.8 percent. But that’s the first time since 1993 that there won’t be more Border Patrol agents than the previous year.

And no further border fencing will be erected, the first time in at least three years the miles of border fencing won’t increase.

His budget might lead one to think the border crisis is over.

Hardly.

In the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which includes every Arizona county except Yuma, La Paz and Mohave, agents apprehended nearly 250,000 illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30. That was about half the total apprehensions made in all of the Mexican border sectors last year.

That’s a far cry from the peak of the crisis in 2006 when 1.1 million illegal immigrants were apprehended along the border, nearly 500,000 of them in Arizona.

But a quarter-million souls caught trying to get into the country through Arizona does not represent a solved problem; it’s still an enormous economic, environmental and humanitarian crisis, especially for Arizona.

The desert south of Tucson has been destroyed. Millions of pounds of trash litter the desert, most concentrated in a few dozen arroyos where immigrants hunker down to hide from the Border Patrol or wait for vehicles to smuggle them to other parts of the country.

In federal fiscal year 2008 the Bureau of Land Management picked up 184,000 pounds of trash and hauled away 70 abandoned vehicles. It barely made a dent in the amount of debris strewn across our public lands.

The BLM estimates that each entrant leaves behind about eight pounds of trash. Since 2006, more than 1 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended in the Tucson Sector. There is no way to know how many more got through, but using the conservative estimate of one getting away for every one caught, that means that in just the past three years an estimated 8 million to 16 million tons of trash has been left by immigrants to foul our desert. That’s the equivalent of driving 350 to 700 trash trucks into the desert and dumping them.

Camping, hiking or biking in the desert surrounding Tucson remains a dangerous affair as coyotes have become increasingly violent in the increasingly lucrative human-smuggling trade.

And the humanitarian toll has only worsened. Despite the recent drop in apprehensions, the number of bodies found in the desert by the Border Patrol hit a record high last year: 208.

The rotten economy, the banking crisis, the housing crisis, two wars and the health care reform political fiasco have obviously consumed the majority of Obama’s attention during his first year in office.

But that’s why we have a Congress. We hope that Arizona’s two senators and eight representatives have not turned their back on the terrible toll illegal immigration is taking on this state and that they set about amending Obama’s ill-considered border security budget.

The crisis continues. Either do more to seal the border or pass comprehensive immigration reform, or both. Doing the same or less than last year is not the answer.