Julia Preston of the New York Times has a brief round-up of the year's events in immigration called "Immigration Is Defying Easy Answers". After some expected NYT bias, she closes with:

The next president will still face the tricky task of negotiating not just the politics of the issue, but also some concrete realities. While border fences and immigration raids have discouraged some illegal immigrants from coming and encouraged some who are here to go home, millions of illegal workers have had families here and put down roots, and are not going to disappear.

This is somewhat of a big step for the NYT: admitting that attrition works without sneering. As for the last part of her statement, that's a very strong argument for doing even more: we can't allow people to simply move here and settle down at will, no matter what the NYT thinks.