That's because we have sensible laws on coffee import. We don't have sensible laws on people. The point is that the current system is quite broken, and the way to fix it is to recognize that we have a problem, we don't have the luxury of sweeping through and arresting everyone (sorry, at 12 million immigrants, even if each police arrested two or three an hour for their 8 hour shift, and could get them to booking, that turns out to be too long a job for too many people, to say nothing of the housing and transport costs to get them back to the border. So we have to work toward another solution, or set of solutions, that will work within budget constraints.
Funny, I live with/amongst a LOT of LEGAL immigrants that obeyed the law.
we don't have the luxury of sweeping through and arresting everyone
If we have the "luxury" of liberating 60M Muslims we were told could never be done, on the opposite side of the earth, why can't we enforce our own laws at home? Oh, that's right, because very few in Washington have the cajones to do so...