It’s in the job description

A massive gun battle between rival Mexican drug and migrant-trafficking gangs about 12 miles from the U.S. border left 21 people dead Thursday.

Not close enough for you? Last Tuesday, the City Hall in El Paso, Texas, took gunfire from across the border, where drug gangs have killed thousands in recent months.

Yet in Thursday remarks at the American University School of International Service in Washington, President Barack Obama declared, "The southern border is more secure today than at any time in the past 20 years."

What?

"The majority of Americans are skeptical ... that it is possible to round up and deport 11 million people," the president said. "Such an effort would be logistically impossible and wildly expensive. Moreover, it would tear at the very fabric of this nation, because immigrants who are here illegally are now intricately woven into that fabric."

Really? Kidnap victims can be "woven into the fabric" of the families that grabbed them, but they're still returned home -- and their abductors jailed -- once they're found.

Mr. Obama's solution? Those "living here illegally ... must be required to admit that they broke the law," the president explained. Then "they should be required to register, pay their taxes, pay a fine, and learn English. ... These are the essential elements of comprehensive immigration reform."

And then they can stay, permanently displacing millions of others, all around the globe from Asia to Africa, many with valuable job skills, who have played by the rules, filed their papers, and waited and waited and waited their turn?

Many said it was "logistically impossible" to supply West Berlin by air during the Russian blockade of 1948-49, or to put men on the moon. We did both.

On the other hand, using a mere 1,075 Border Patrol agents (far fewer than Mr. Obama has available today), President Eisenhower's men rounded up 80,000 illegal immigrants in Texas alone in 1954's "Operation Wetback," at which point an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 additional illegal immigrants got the picture and departed on their own accord, from Texas alone.

Amnesty was tried in 1986. It failed. Roundups were tried in 1954. They worked.

Mr. Obama sought to become the nation's chief law enforcement officer. He volunteered. He swore an oath.

America already has immigration laws. How do we know they can't be enforced if no one has tried? Time to try.