Before September 11, the Bush administration tried to push through an amnesty for illegal immigrants from Mexico--although it avoided the word "amnesty.".

* Before September 11, the Bush administration tried to push through an amnesty for illegal immigrants from Mexico--although it avoided the word "amnesty." We thought this was bad policy and bad politics. For one thing, the Democrats would easily one-up the president by calling for an amnesty for all Hispanic illegals. (They did.) But after the September 11 attacks, everyone realized the public would not stand for a relaxation of border controls. Now the idea is back. Tom Ridge suggested that we must "legalize" the millions of illegal immigrants here. We suppose we should be grateful that the fiction that this step could be confined to Mexicans has been abandoned. Ridge and his colleagues present an amnesty as sober realism: We have millions of illegals here, we are not going to deport them all, so we have no choice but to make them legal. Yet we do have other options. As Mark Krikorian has written in these pages, the illegal population suffers natural attrition as people go back home--unless the ranks of illegals are replenished by newcomers. A tightening of controls at the border will thus lead to a gradual reduction in the number of illegal immigrants in America. The question, then, is whether Washington is serious about enforcing the immigration laws. We're afraid we already know the answer to that.