Jeff Jacoby does yeoman’s work making the conservative case at the Boston Globe, but his immigration column yesterday was sloppy. The central conceit was that we can’t deport all 12 million illegal aliens, so we have to legalize them instead. It is true that we can’t deport them all — the Homeland Security Inspector General just today released another report on problems in the deportation operation; story here, full report here. But the real solution is using consistent, across-the-board enforcement to downsize the illegal population over time, as I described here.

And that doesn’t mean that Karl Rove’s kid will have to be drafted to pick tomatoes. Instead, this story from the El Paso paper describes the likely course of events: “In the not-so-distant future, many farm workers may lose their jobs to farm machinery that continues to chop into the local industry.” Faster, please.