I think most analysts have misunderstood Janet Napolitano’s immigration speech Friday at the Center for American Progress. While Mickey Kaus correctly identifies its hilarious illogic:

It seems like almost yesterday that the official, liberal pro-legalization position was that the decline in the number of illegals had little to do with increased enforcement. It was all the declining economy. (After all, illegals are here to stay and there’s nothing we can do about that, right? But if enforcement works to produce a big demographic shift ….) Now Obama Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano is claiming that we can go ahead with legalization because “better enforcement” has indeed worked to produce a decline in the number of illegals. But wasn’t that all due to the economy? I sense a contradiction.

His description of the talk as signaling a “new push” for amnesty is, I think mistaken. Steve Sailer likewise misses the point of the speech:

The goal is to freeze unemployed illegal aliens in the United States so that they will be future voters. Obama doesn’t want them to go home to their families in their warm home countries this winter. His message is: Leave America now and you’ll miss out on the Amnesty.

In fact, the speech was a Friday news dump intended mainly to string along the president’s pro-amnesty supporters, who are getting increasingly panicked as they see that the Messiah just doesn’t care that much about their issue. Most of Napolitano’s remarks were the usual baloney, including Chuck Schumer’s (and John McCain’s during the campaign) talking point that the enforcement we’ve long demanded is now in place so it’s time to move on to the amnesty.

But J-Nap made clear that the ball was in Congress’s court: “When Congress is ready to act, we will be ready to support them,” “This is why key members of Congress are taking steps toward legislation that will create an immigration system that works,” “If we are truly going to fix a broken system, Congress will have to act,” “we need Congress to create the legal foundation for bringing the millions of illegal immigrants in this country out of the shadows.” But with unemployment over 10 percent, among other reasons, Congress isn’t going to do any of this, so the White House is giving itself plausible deniability.

String along La Raza, prepare to blame Congress for failure, and make sure it’s all reported in the least-read newspaper of the week. As my colleague Jon Feere writes, “Amnesty is a year away, and always will be.”