Numbers USA's Roy Beck is a sunnier fellow than VDARE.com's Peter Brimelow, so whereas Peter complained after last night's debate that Mitt Romney wants to let illegals take US military jobs, Beck cheerfully points out that Romney also appears to have caught on to the idea of "self-deportation"—a key patriotic immigration reform concept I wrote about last night myself. Beck says:

Romney Stumps Many With NumbersUSA's Basic 'Self-Deportation' Plan — Newt Joins Mitt Vs. Dream Act Amnesty

January 23, 2012, 11:51 PM EST

In the Tampa Bay debate Monday night, Mitt Romney confounded wide swaths of the internet with a concept that we've been trying for years to persuade the news media to acknowledge: A concept of handling the illegal alien population with something between mass legalization and mass deportation. Simply put, you take away the things that drew illegal aliens here and let most of them self-deport. Most especially, you take away the jobs magnet.

The questioning began with the political editor at The Tampa Bay Times (Adam Smith) saying he was confused.

Governor Romney, there is one thing I'm confused about. You say you don't want to go and round up people and deport them, but you also say that they would have to go back to their home countries and then apply for citizenship. So, if you don't deport them, how do you send them home?

— Debate moderator Adam Smith, Tampa Bay Times

I'm glad he asked the question. But if he really was confused, it means that he has closed his ears for years to advocates and groups like NumbersUSA that have insisted that mass deportation is not on the table in Congress in any way and that the alternative to legalizations/amnesty is a concept known either as "attrition through enforcement" or "self deportation."

 

But Smith wasn't the only one that appeared clueless to this fact Monday night.

One of the odder turns of phrase that came up during the debate was "self-deportation." Romney said illegal immigrants will leave the country — self-deport — if employment and other laws are enforced and they decide that it's no longer desirable to be in the U.S.

— Mark Memmott, NPR.com

An odd turn of phrase?

Good grief. Does anybody who writes about immigration ever bother to check in on anybody on our side of the issue? At least once every five years or so? [More]

It's a basic, existential problem with journalism that journalists are constantly writing from ignorance, since we (I'll include myself in this) take the whole world for our subject, and no one can know everything. If you see a newspaper story about your trade, profession, or hobby, you can't help noticing that they got it all wrong.

But on immigration, the ignorance of the mainstream media is willful. They don't want to know.

You can read more about what Romney said in debate, more on self-deportation, and an even dumber example of MSM cluelessness at NumbersUSA—I'm not ripping off the whole post. I will mention that I wrote about this concept last night, using the analogy of the pigeons that used to swarm Trafalgar Square until

the year 2003, Red Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, declared a Year Zero on the Trafalgar Square pigeons, and got rid of them.

You may be wondering how he did this.

Did he

• Build a fence around the square?
• Send an anti-pigeon Gestapo around to their nests?
• Engage in pigeon profiling?

Here's what he did:

HE STOPPED FEEDING THEM!!!

Wikipedia:

“In 2005, the sale of bird seed in the square was stopped and other measures introduced to discourage the pigeons, including the use of trained birds of prey. Groups of supporters continued to feed the birds, but in 2003 the then-Mayor, Ken Livingstone, enacted bylaws to ban the feeding of pigeons in the square. ”

A pre-Livingstone picture of the square shows a pigeon food seller—he and his colleagues were the reason the pigeons were there. When Livingstone banned the sale of pigeon food, all the little pigeons got on their pigeon bicycles and flew away.