What the President should say about immigration but won't - Part 4 - Deportation

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Immigration Compromise Likely to Strip Out Citizenship:
"But the House Republican leadership has already acknowledged that making illegal immigration a felony, and deporting all those violators, is both politically unacceptable and logistically impossible."

Says who?

The argument that we can't deport 12 million illegals (or 9 million or 30 million, depending on who is doing the estimating) so we shouldn't try, is an amazingly weak one if anyone would bother to look at it. Would anyone argue that because we can't save all the victims of car wrecks we shouldn't bother sending ambulances and EMTs to accident scenes? There is a name for that kind of thinking - letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

I find it truly bizarre that people take this argument seriously and at the same time believe that we can set up a bureaucracy to process the amnesty claims of eight or ten million (or maybe two or three times that number) illegal entrants.

The various plans being floated by the administration and on the Hill and from the foundations and think tanks and other refuges of the policy wonks all contain some combination of elements like proof of residence before some date, proof of employment, payment of a nominal fine, some tax payments, lack of criminal record, etc.

How are they going to shuffle all those papers? Are they really going to check with landlords to verify length of residence? Are they going to take fingerprints of all these people and run them through AFIS? Are they going to check personally with all their employers to figure what taxes they owe?

I'll tell you what the government will end up doing. They will give contracts to various groups who are now lobbying for an amnesty program to run the application processing. The excuse will be that these are community and social welfare organizations with a presence in the immigrant neighborhoods and a knowledge of their language and culture and that these persons who entered illegally would be intimidated if they had to go to the police or immigration enforcement agency to be fingerprinted, photographed and fill out all the forms.

The result will be what we saw during the Clinton administration when they hired immigration lobbies to process citizenship applications in a rush to enroll new voters - massive errors, including citizenship for thousands of criminals who did not meet the criteria.

You don't have to deport all the illegals, nor do you have to do it quickly, in order to have a salutary effect on the American economy which is suffering tremendously from the burden of caring for these persons who came here uninvited.