Self deportation underway in Arizona before law takes effect

Ed Morrissey:

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There are a couple of lessons to be drawn from this. First, it doesn’t take much to see some self-enforcement on immigration law. In this case, it doesn’t even require a single act of actual enforcement. All that is needed is government taking its law-enforcement responsibilities seriously, a lesson that we learned in another context when Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York City.

Next, it reveals the disingenuous response from Washington DC. The federal government keeps saying that it lacks the resources to enforce the laws it has, but quite obviously, Arizona has much fewer resources than the Obama administration, and all they had to do was pass a law and make it stick. If the federal government took its job seriously rather than look to pander to Hispanic voters with its deliberate incompetence on immigration enforcement, the issue would mostly resolve itself with little effort — and the resources remaining would be more than sufficient to deal with those left.

Many of those packing in Arizona are heading back across the border, but some intend to move elsewhere in the US. Expect more states to start getting tough on immigration enforcement as Arizona’s success becomes more apparent.

That would be bad news for Democrats who hoped to turn these people into reliable Democrat votes rather than see them leave as illegals. If ICE were permitted to go back to the work place raids you would see a lot more self deportations.