The study does not envision a new policy of mass deportation, with ICE agents rounding up immigrants in vans or going door-to-door to find them. Rather, researchers used the government's own statement that it currently has the capacity to deport up to 400,000 immigrants annually (330,651 were removed in 2013) and asked what would happen if it actually did that, every year until the 11 million are gone. They also estimate that after the government announces a new policy of full enforcement, about 20 percent of the 11 million would leave voluntarily, leaving just about nine million that would need to be forcibly removed. "It still would be, I think, a shocking sight to the American people, to have the detentions, the deportations, the detention centers, the need for the administrative end of this," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the group's president. "If you were to do it faster and have vans sweeping in, I think that would have the untenable feel of the police state to the American people. We didn’t look at that."

The American Action Forum is not some fringe group; it is well-entrenched in the establishment camp. Holtz-Eakin is a leading Republican economist who advised John McCain's presidential campaign in 2008. In 2013, he released a paper arguing that comprehensive reform would boost economic growth and reduce long-term deficits by $2.5 trillion. The group's board includes Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary who helped lead President George W. Bush's immigration-reform push in 2006 and 2007. It also includes Elaine Chao, the labor secretary in the Bush administration and the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The latest study doesn't take an explicit policy position, and Holtz-Eakin said its release was not deliberately timed to the resolution earlier this week of the DHS funding fight, when Republicans abandoned—for the moment—their effort to repeal the unilateral immigration actions President Obama took late last year. Since the group had already examined the policy implications of reforms that offered legal status to undocumented immigrants, he said he thought, "Well, what are the other possibilities? And the only well-defined thing is to enforce current law."

Yet opponents of comprehensive reform and a so-called "amnesty" program say that's not quite true. While "enforce the law" is an oft-repeated demand from the right, one prominent immigration foe, Roy Beck of Numbers USA, told me that he doesn't support the policy that American Action Forum examined. "We're opposed to enforcing the laws as they currently exist. The law is not adequate," he said. Beck said the government is spending money on border security inefficiently and that he supported legislation approved last week by the House Judiciary Committee that would stiffen penalties for employers who hire undocumented immigrants.