During the last debate, Mitt Romney supported a form of what's called "attrition" to reduce the numbers of illegal aliens in the U.S., suggesting that many would self-deport; see the link for a description of that plan. The reaction by many to Romney's use of "self-deport" was more than a bit shocking.

Now, see the video below (cached) where Newt Gingrich mocks something that actually happens: many illegal aliens do leave on their own because of economic and other factors. Gingrich says:

"You have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatically $20 million income for no work to have some fantasy this far from reality. For Romney to believe that somebody's grandmother is going to be so cut off that she is going to self-deport, I mean this is an Obama-level fantasy."

Under attrition (see the link), the breadwinner(s) of the family would have difficulty finding work and would eventually make the rational decision to leave voluntarily, taking the rest of the family with them. There might be a small number of older illegal aliens who are on some sort of fixed income that would be affected by attrition, but that can be dealt with in other ways (such as by encouraging the Mexican government to fulfill their responsibilities to their own citizens).

That leaves the vast majority of cases, the ones that Gingrich is ignoring: younger single workers and families who have the ability to leave the U.S. because they can't find work and thus for whom attrition stands a good chance of being effective (perhaps augmented with a repatriation program). Obviously, the interviewer (Jorge Ramos of Univision) isn't going to call Gingrich on misleading people by ignoring the vast majority of cases.

To make things even worse, Gingrich says that Romney "shows no humanity for the people that are already here", references how he was involved in the 1986 amnesty, and says that we need to have a conversation about how to "get us to legality for the entire country".

See the attrition page for the details of that plan. If you haven't heard of it (or "self-deport") before, that's by design: the establishment media and many politicians have used the deportations false choice to try to prevent you from hearing about it.