It’s pretty easy to paint all kinds of immigrants with the same brush. It’s been a handy tool for us in the last year or so. Students, workers, illegals — we’ve gotten accustomed to eyeing each group of immigrants, from anywhere, with the same kind of skepticism.

For a country that prides itself on being a melting pot or at least a tossed salad, the last year has jolted us into a xenophobic stew. Some describe a guilty anxiety when seated next to another airline passenger of a darker persuasion. Students from abroad are forced to undergo more checks and scrutiny. Most are ready to overhaul the Immigration and Naturalization Service and its byzantine bureaucracy.

This month in Denison, we have witnessed firsthand the variety of immigration that silently fills our country with the immigrants who aren’t undergoing checks at the international student office on campus, who aren’t going to flight school on shady precepts, who aren’t putting the country on alert. They are picking berries in California, killing hogs in Iowa, laying sod in a thousand suburbs and scrubbing toilets in the chain hotels at interstate exits across the country.

And every year, people die during their passage to this life in the promised land, producing other people’s food and cleaning other people’s castles.

The 11 bodies found in a rail car near the elevator in Denison are testimony to the high cost of immigrating to the United States — even coming from Matamoros, Mexico. While we are learning that those found in Denison months after they began their fateful journey hailed from many different places in Mexico and Central America, we are pretty certain that in June they didn’t intend to arrive in Denison.

We can point to the illegality of the actions that led to 11 people surreptitiously crossing the United States-Mexico border, getting documents and finally getting spirited into a rail car to take them north to the rail yards of Oklahoma City and finally to Denison, to be discovered by an elevator employee. At the same time, even the most heinous illegal crimes in this country are not punished by hours of suffocation, dehydration and death due to overheating.

Cracking down on immigration produces the unsavory prospect of more smugglers and human traffickers making a killing on sneaking people across the border, and placing their human cargo at extreme risk for an exorbitant price. As a result, only more cases like the human remains found in Denison will pop up. And not just in cases of border crossings, but in cases like the 2000 discovery in the Port of Seattle in which a shipping container bound from China had four dead Chinese people rather than cases of toys and plastic trinkets.

The smuggler got only a nine-year sentence for the deaths of four immigrants, who each paid him more than $40,000 for the trip to America.

Getting serious about illegal immigration is one thing, but going after every illegal who washes dishes for six bucks an hour is a poor use of government personnel and resources. The real perpetrators are the smugglers, who may earn more for each person smuggled than the illegals themselves earn in a year working in the United States. Convincing people to leave their families and livelihoods in pursuit of elusive riches in the United States, the smugglers then take hard-earned savings and promise a life of opportunity at the other side of the passage. Indeed, for those who successfully gain entry to the United States, possibilities for a better life surround them.

The real tragedy of illegal immigration is not largely borne by the United States. We get plenty of people willing to do any sort of dirty, degrading, menial job, ensuring cheap food, landscaping and hotel stays. They pay into Social Security but cannot claim it. These immigrants keep our economy running. However, when a case like the four found in the Port of Seattle or the Denison 11 arises, we have thousands of dollars of investigation, forensics and court costs to bear, while the smugglers who precipitated these horrors recline in comfort with the thousands earned from these passages with no guarantee.

Smugglers are encouraging immigrants to knowingly or unknowingly break U.S. law. If we cut the human smugglers out of the equation by placing heavy sanctions on those who traffic others, we can work to avoid people dying to get into the United States.

Rachel Faber Machacha

is a graduate student in international development studies. She is the opinion editor of the Daily.