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Immigration and Customs Enforcement's new strategy of focusing on those who hire illegal immigrants rather than on the workers themselves is designed to change the culture of illegal labor in the United States, the agency's new chief said last week in Tucson.

"We are trying to provide for the first time a truly national deterrence to the unlawful employment of labor in the United States," said John Morton, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "If we are going to make a meaningful and lasting change in behavior, we need to focus first and foremost on employers."

That doesn't mean agents will stop arresting illegal workers they encounter, but the way of conducting investigations will shift, said Morton, a career U.S. Department of Justice official with experience in immigration enforcement and criminal prosecution.

"We are going to focus more attention on investigating and prosecuting employers, rather than starting out with simply focusing on the workers themselves," Morton said. "We have too many people knowingly hiring individuals who are not in this country lawfully."

Morton, nominated by President Obama in February and sworn in last month, spoke about several issues facing his agency during an interview in Tucson.

Q: Does ICE have enough agents and investigators to put a dent in that job magnet you are talking about?

A: I don't know; I've been on the job two weeks. I think we have sufficient resources to start and pursue a very aggressive program, and I intend to do that. Whether we have enough resources to carry this to its logical conclusion over the next couple of years is a question I need to look at and resolve.

Q: Would you like to see E-Verify, the employer verification system, become mandatory nationwide as it is in Arizona?

A: Some form of employment verification is a good thing and ought to be part of the government's overall work-site enforcement strategy. I want to see how E-Verify, in particular, plays out over the next year and how some of the changes and improvements being made to the program play out before settling on whether E-Verify itself in its present form is the vehicle for the future.

Q: Many have said that having to prove that an employer "knowingly" hired an illegal worker is a major hurdle in putting cases together against employers; can ICE ever really get at the job magnet with the law written as such?

A: I am a former federal prosecutor, and one of the things that I want to do is to take a look at the statutory offenses and penalties for the knowing hire of unlawful labor, both as a criminal manner and a civil manner. I think that some of them may need some revision and improvement. I need to look at the question a little bit further, though, to address it with any specifics.

We are going to use the tools that we have now, and they do exist. I don't want to suggest that there aren't tools to use, but I want to take a look at whether we need to improve the law as well.

Q: What issues are you focusing on as you begin this job?

A: My general focus is to try to make the agency as efficient and robust as it can be to pursue its law-enforcement responsibilities thoughtfully to bring the right priorities to bear. ICE has a tremendous breadth of statutory responsibilities — a whole host of customs offenses, a whole host of immigration offenses — and I really want to make sure we are using the resources that we have to focus on the most serious challenges that are facing the communities that we are here to protect and support. In the context of somewhere like Tucson, that is trying to focus on the worst-of-the-worst criminals, large narcotics-smuggling organizations, human smuggling, gun trafficking, illicit money laundering.

I also want to work very hard to restore some basic integrity to our immigration and customs systems to make sure that our system is not only marked by generous legal immigration, but a lawful system, an orderly system that has integrity to it."

Q: What do you mean when you say "restore the integrity"?

A: It's beyond dispute at this point that our system doesn't always work well, that there is some need for some change. We have millions of people who have come to the country unlawfully, and there's a concern that our borders are not secure and that our immigration system doesn't function properly. I'm going to do what I can to try to restore some sense of basic credibility and integrity to it.