The president, meanwhile seems to actually be permitting a few real steps toward better enforcement. Today’s front-page WaPo story on the tent-city detention center for non-Mexican illegals in south Texas makes clear that these enforcement moves (including new efforts at the worksite, like this one) are part of the administration’s Mary Poppins strategy; to paraphrase Julie Andrews, ”a spoonful of enforcement helps the amnesty go down.” Or, as the Post reporters put it, to get an amnesty, “the government must convince skeptics that it can credibly enforce laws aimed at illegal immigrants and their employers, and can hold and deport those caught by the U.S. Border Patrol.”

Immigration hawks shouldn’t be churlish about these new enforcement moves — we need to be able to take “yes” for an answer. At the same time, though, it’s important to note that this stepped-up enforcement is what we should have been doing all along. The administration is basically like the person Chris Rock refers to in one of his bits, who brags that he’s never been incarcerated: “What do you want, a cookie?! You’re not supposed to go to jail, you low expectation-having [expletive deleted]!” If the feds keep up enforcement — and expand it, because there are a lot of things that need to be done that still aren’t — for five or 10 years, their newfound credibility, and the resulting smaller illegal population, will permit at least a debate on the question of amnesty. But until then, there is no plausible case for even discussing “earned legalization” or a “path to citizenship.”