Our discussion of amnesty should begin at the beginning, and in the beginning was the word—"amnesty." You and other proponents of an amnesty for illegal aliens bristle at the term, and for good reason—the National Council of La Raza did focus groups in 2001 to prepare for Mexican President Vicente Fox's amnesty push and found that Americans didn't like the word at all. So amnesty supporters developed an array of euphemisms, including "legalization," "regularization," "normalization," "earned adjustment," "comprehensive reform," and "path to citizenship"—there must be others, but I can't keep track.

One of Jimmy Carter's economic advisors found himself in a similar position, having been forbidden to use the word "recession" because it scared people; so, he called it a "banana" instead, as in "Between 1973 and 1975 we had the deepest banana that we had in 35 years." When the banana farmers complained, he changed it to "kumquat."

But whether President Bush and John McCain and Ted Kennedy want to call their proposal a banana or a kumquat, the substance is the same—regardless of the hoops they'd have to jump through, the illegal aliens would get to stay here legally, and that's an amnesty.

Now, maybe an amnesty is a good idea, in which case your side should make the case for it honestly, without obfuscation.

But, of course, it's not a good idea. In fact, it shouldn't even be a topic for discussion until after we regain control of our immigration system. We tried your approach in 1986, combining amnesty for illegal aliens with promises of a new commitment to enforcement in the future. Naturally, those enforcement promises were abandoned as soon as the illegals got their amnesty.

An old Russian saying tells us, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

Having been burned by this 1986 experience, congressional Republicans last year insisted on an "Enforcement First" approach, demanding that real enforcement measures be implemented, funded, and shown to be working before any discussion of amnesty for the illegals already here would go forward. As Thomas Sowell wrote: "It will take time to see how various new border control methods work out in practice and there is no reason to rush ahead to deal with people already illegally in this country before the facts are in on how well the borders have been secured."

You and President Bush and others have disagreed, claiming that immigration cannot be controlled without an amnesty and huge new guestworker programs. This is an assertion untethered to any evidence—in fact, other than beefing up our still-inadequate effort at the border itself, we've never seriously tried to enforce the immigration law, so how can you know it won't work?

On the contrary, the Center for Immigration studies has used the government's own statistics on churn in the illegal population to estimate that we could reduce the number of illegal aliens by about half in five years, mainly by using ordinary law-enforcement techniques to persuade more and more of them to give up and deport themselves. We have seen this work in certain short-lived instances where the government summoned the gumption to stand up to the elite interests that support open borders.

Applying that lesson consistently—"comprehensively"!—nationwide would test which of us is right: if the illegal population were to keep growing rapidly, despite a years-long, muscular, across-the-board effort at enforcement, then I would be open to considering amnesty for those already here and huge increases in future legal flows. But you know as well as I that the result would be quite different; a comprehensive enforcement strategy would shrink the illegal population significantly. Even Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff admitted last week that stepped up border-enforcement efforts (launched by the White House to garner congressional votes for an amnesty later this year) are actually starting to work, deterring people from sneaking across the border.

Why wouldn't we keep that up, along with real worksite enforcement, better ID standards, full implementation of the check-in/check-out system at border crossings, better coordination among federal agencies and between the feds and state and local police—in other words, why not try a comprehensive enforcement strategy before declaring surrender and passing an amnesty?

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports tighter controls on immigration.

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Oh c'mon, Mark, surely even you know there are some limits to wishful thinking? Can't you see that your attrition strategy is a fantasy—and an ugly fantasy at that?

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