I think if these people are willing to go through so much hardship and trial to get here, we ought to figure out a way to give them a chance to legally work here and at the least, eventually a well-defined pathway to legal residency. They doesn't mean "open borders". We absolutely need to be vetting and checking for criminal records. And it also means doing what we can do that makes strategic and humanitarian sense to improve living conditions in the countries they're coming from.

5,000 people sounds like a huge number, but it really isn't. We NEED immigration, and we also need entry-level labor. 

Our immigration policies are an abject failure and inhumane. That's on Congress, and none of it is being helped by the presence of Stephen Miller (R-Xenophobia) in the White House.

"Because they came from a place that's a mess and managed to make it to the border" are not good steady-state criteria. We can't solve the hemisphere's issues by letting people from there in en masse. Those countries need to fix their own issues.