The numbers are sobering. The federal government reported Tuesday that immigration agents apprehended 76,000 people — most of them families or unaccompanied minors — at the U.S.-Mexico border in February, twice the level of the previous year and the highest for February in 11 years. The increase continues a trend that began in the fall, and offers direct evidence that President Donald Trump's strategy of maximum enforcement at the border is not reducing the flow of migrants.

And no, the answer is not "a big, beautiful wall." Most of those apprehended weren't trying to sneak past border agents; instead, they sought out agents once they reached the border and turned themselves in, hoping to receive asylum or other permission to stay.

Furthermore, the situation isn't a military confrontation, though Trump has sent troops to the border. Nor is it a national security emergency, as he has declared in an effort to spend more on his border wall than Congress provided. It's a complex humanitarian crisis that appears to be worsening, and it's going to take creative analytical minds to address.

For example, most of the families flowing north in recent months come from poor regions of Guatemala, including the Western Highlands region, where food insecurity and local conflicts over land rights and environmental protections are pushing more people off their farms and into even deeper poverty, according to human rights observers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Just months earlier, gang violence in urbanized areas was pushing people north to the United States; increasingly, it's economics.

But experts argue that Trump's rhetoric may be playing a role, too. The more he threatens draconian enforcement measures and cutbacks in legal immigration, the more people contemplating moving north are pushed to go sooner, before it gets even harder to reach the U.S. Similarly, more migrants are arriving at more treacherous and remote stretches of the border to avoid getting stuck in Tijuana or other border cities where the U.S. government has reduced the number of asylum-seekers it will allow in, claiming an inability to process the requests.

The system is overwhelmed. But the solution is neither to build a wall, nor to incarcerate more people, nor to separate children from their parents, nor to deny people the right to exercise their legal right to seek asylum. The solution is to improve the efficiency and capacity of the system to deal with the changed migrant demographics.

FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES