Apparently, substantial numbers of ordinary Americans believe that the embrace of a policy calling for the deportation of some 11 million undocumented immigrants is some kind of bluff or masturbatory pipe dream of the hard-core Republican Right. Alas, their naiveté is dangerous and misplaced.
The criminalization of unlawful immigration represents the perfect opportunity to implement the full apparatus of the police state the government has only hinted at with such incipient efforts as the Patriot Act, secret rendition, indefinite detention, and Guantanamo Bay. The fundamental methodology of building any effective police state is to diminish the legal status of entire classes of people to that of virtual non-persons, placing them beyond the protection of the law, and subjecting them to brutal and arbitrary enforcement, including chronic economic exploitation, deportation and imprisonment.
Moreover, the timing of such a policy could hardly be more ideal, just when the public may be not only experiencing a certain weariness with our government’s interminable wars on drugs, crime, and child pornography, but when – God forbid – a certain element is even contemplating a declaration of victory in the holy and perpetual war on terror. The spectacular infusion of cash and other resources to the prison-industrial complex following the transformation of 11 million unlawful residents into overnight felons is mind-boggling. Beyond the explosion in jobs for cops, prosecutors, judges, probation officers, guards, and innumerable other enforcement and administrative personnel, there are the countless billions to be had from prison construction contracts, inmate labor, civil forfeiture and criminal confiscation, political patronage, Halliburton-style corporate welfare, and regulatory schemes and bureaucratic agencies of every stripe imaginable.
No, this policy is no bluff, but the greatest potential expansion of the Republican police state since the White House first grasped the possibilities of subverting the Constitution on September 11th, 2001.

Gee, FM, thanks for the fresh perspective, for opening my eyes to a whole new way of seeing the issue! Kind of makes me want to grunt out a verse of “God Bless America,” break open a new box of crayons, and scrawl a letter asking how the great and humane man of letters, Meir Kahane, would have handled the matter.