Andy McCarthy on Illegal Immigration and Attrition
This covers it about as well as I've seen:
Regarding immigration like a crime problem is the succinct answer to the comprehensive-reform crowd's best rhetorical device: The searing question, What are you going to do about 12 million people? The answer is: The same thing I do about the millions of drug felonies that happen yearly.
I don't expect to deal with every one, much as I might like to. I don't have the resources and the public would not support such a sweeping program. So, I am going to go after the low-hanging fruit (smugglers and felons who are apprehended by federal state and local authorities violating criminal laws), I am going to deal aggressively with the root of the problem (the employers who knowingly hire illegals — if I had my druthers, I would also address access to public welfare services and too-easy citizenship qualification, but that is probably too much to ask). And I am going to strengthen my border and external enforcement to try to prevent the flow from getting here in the first place.
But as for the rest, I am going to tolerate their law-breaking — not approve it or give it amnesty, but grudgingly tolerate it — as I do with the gazillion instances of people who use illegal drugs. I am going to make life difficult for them; I am going to round up the occasional bunch of them so they don't get too comfortable in their law-breaking; and I am going to encourage other measures (analogous to drug testing in schools and certain industries) which, short of arrest, discourage the behavior. But I am going to realistically accept that I can't, and don't want to, round-up every offender. Illegal immigration is a crime problem to be managed and reduced, not exterminated.
Remember that...we don't need to round up and deport 12 million illegals, any more than we round up and jail every criminal in the U.S. We do the best we can with the resources available, and consistent with our notion of liberty, and we do so in the knowledge that while we can't catch all criminals, the ones we do catch and punish provide a disincentive to the rest.