When you organize yourself around bigotry ...

In all the analysis of the GOP’s immigration stance, it’s pretty much been taken for granted that the “self-deportation” stance of Mitt Romney—perhaps his most popular policy stance for movement conservatives, and an important key to his nomination—has to be discarded. But all this insistence on ruling out any “special path” to citizenship, however limited and remote, and on “hard triggers” for legalization that are designed to be unreachable, thinly disguises a fundamental unwillingness to accept the presence of unauthorized immigrants and the hope they will all find life here miserable enough to eventually go home. Illegal border crossings have already slackened significantly. The number of deportations remain very high. So all the talk of “enforcement first” increasingly sounds like an excuse for avoiding or at least delaying legalization in any form.

Conservatives have plenty of grounds for believing the Republican Establishment is being dishonest about its intentions on immigration policy, and is trying to “trick the base,” as I put it yesterday. But for the most part, they are being dishonest, too. They know they can’t just advocate rounding up 11 million people and sending them in boxcars across the border. And “self-deportation” sounds (and is) cruel. But by finding grievous fault with any workable—much less politically feasible—approach for dealing with the undocumented, they are actually fighting to ensure nothing replaces deportations and self-deportations as the de facto policy, particularly in a future Republican administration that owes nothing to Hispanic or Asian voters.