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Dog, as Grant said there’s no better way to get rid of a bad law than to enforce it. Stop and think, honestly, about what a serious deportation program would entail: 12+ million people! It’s the equivalent of the nuke-em now scheme for dealing with the Middle East.

Ain’t gonna happen.

The very best we can hope for in this situation is some kind of freeze of what we have now with a overall downgrade of the migrant flow. Meanwhile, we don’t want illegals to become citizens; we cannot send them all home; and the market demands their labor. Contradiction rules.

What needs to stop is the continuing flow. But even here the process contradicts the solution: if we were to effectively cut off the migration flow, we would strand millions of illegals in the country. So back to deportation — or amnesty of some sort. The anti-immigration laws of 1924 cut off inflows of European migration. It also cut-off the outflows. Prior to that law, over half of Italian immigrants stayed a while and then left the country; after 1924, nearly all of them stayed. Border and migration/flow control will only result in isolation of the people who are here now. And Chertoff is absolutely correct that it is politically impossible to deport those who remain. Impossible. It’s a reality that we must face; otherwise we’re just bitching and, worse, fantasizing towards self-defeat.

The reasonable solution is to accommodate “return migration” through temporary permits, discourage settlement through employer-based documentation, and discourage illegal transit through increased border enforcement.

Any one of those solutions alone is self-defeating. Only balanced together can any of it work. I’m terrifically sad that the Republican congress was incapable of dealing with this situation. Now we’re stuck with dims who only want amnesty and don’t give a damn for enforcement. I believe that pressure from enforcement-only scared the Pubbies congress away from a more reasonable balance of strategies.