Mickey Kaus, on the Senate debate on immigration, and in particular the issue of amnesty:

The actual sight of millions of illegals having to leave the country might have a deterrent, they-mean-business effect that could counterbalance the inevitable incentive effect (on potential future illegals) of the deal's partial semi-amnesty.

(snip)

To get a disincentive we-mean-business effect, potential immigrants would need to see large numbers of recent immigrants actually leaving the country.

Lord, is there anything that would trigger the Law of Unintended Consequences faster than the sight of millions of our friends and neighbors being booted out of the country, many of them unwillingly...has Kaus ever seen the mass deportation of refugees, of what the "actual sight of millions of illegals having to leave the country" would look like? Neighbors ratting out neighbors, jackbooted INS thugs arresting people (sorry, "illegals") in the middle of the night, entire sections of our cities evacuated, current citizens being compelled to carry national I.D. cards to stave off being deported on a whim; if there is anything less consistent with showing "we mean business" than the voters two or three years from now, deciding that Bosnia or Kosovo, circa 1994, isn't what we really wanted, and demanding that the law be changed yet again to undo such a policy?

And think about how such images would stain the image of the United States overseas. As if Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and our other torture camps aren't bad enough, we would now have on our collective souls the sight of people being uprooted from their homes, involuntarily, to return to a life of destitution, unemployment and political repression in their native countries. Of course, this assumes that we even have the will to show "we mean business"; more likely, who ever is in charge of Homeland Security will be satisfied not with the mass eviction of illegal immigrants, but a few token arrests, enough to show the Tancredos and Malkins of the world that the House version of the proposed law is being enforced, but not enough to actually send any deterrent to future immigrants. In short, it would be like the current legal regime, where immigration is treated with the same rigor as laws illegalizing pot.

In the long run, the more draconian the law Congress passes, the less likely it would have any long-term impact on immigration, other than to alert potential immigrants as to who their real friends in the halls of government are. Needless to say, it would be a half-century before the GOP gets anything more than 5-10% of the Latino and Asian-American vote. Florida would become as blue as California, and Texas would become competitive again. We can't pretend that crossing a national boundary for the purpose of finding work and supporting your family is inherently wrong, and passing a law making it a felony on par with carjacking and selling crack to schoolchildren isn't going to make anyone respect the rule of law.