[Paine in the Neck]

“I think the idea that we are going to deport 12 million people — that is not reality.”

This is the amnesty dog whistle.

If Perry's against amnesty then he and I have very different notions of what "amnesty" means. I like Perry in a lot of ways and I think he'd be infinitely better than what we have now or any of the RINO offerings being pushed at us for 2016 but he's got to get right on this issue or I simply can't support him. The policy should be:

1. secure the border in a transparently verifiable way;
2. end the anchor-baby interpretation of the 14th Amendment;
3. enforce eVerify without exception and with severe penalties;
4. no government benefits beyond critical emergency care (and that ought to be billed back to the home government); and
5. NO "Path to Citizenship" - ever - for anyone who has entered the US illegally.

Any policy that does not accomplish these five things is unacceptable. It is de facto amnesty. And it will inevitably encourage millions more illegal entries.

[BuckeyeTexan]

Agreed on the policy statements. 100%

Respectfully disagree on “dog whistle.” I don’t see deporting 12 million as any more feasible, logistically speaking, than building and maintaining a border fence. Is it a great idea? Hell, yeah, in theory.

How do we do it? You listed a couple of ways to attack it, but it would take decades to deport all 12 million and by then we’d have 24 million. Do we have the State National Guards go door-to-door to round them all up? Where do we put them while we’re deporting them? FEMA internment camps? How do we, logistically, get from point A to point B?

Granting them citizenship or any form of legality is not the answer, but what is the answer besides rhetoric and theory?