My colleagues Steve Camarota and Karen Jensenius have a new report out today estimating that the total illegal-immigrant population has dropped from 12.5 million during the amnesty debate in 2007 to 10.8 million in the first quarter of this year. And enforcement is part of the reason, in addition to the economy — the decline started before the recession and has affected only illegal immigrants, while the number of legal immigrants continues to increase. Not only have fewer illegal aliens been coming but the number leaving has doubled compared to earlier in this decade. The moral of the story is that there’s no ratchet effect in illegal immigration, so let’s keep up enforcement and see how many more illegal immigrants we can induce to deport themselves before we start talking about amnesty.