MARK KRIKORIAN: Message to Illegals: Winter Is Coming, So Get Ahead of It.

President-elect Trump during the campaign promised “the largest deportation in the history of our country.” Polls taken during the campaign found widespread public support.

In an Axios poll this spring, 51 percent of respondents supported “mass deportations of undocumented immigrants,” including 42 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Latinos.

A CBS News poll in June found 62 percent support for a “new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants,” including a third of Democrats.

Trump’s decisive victory this week gives him the mandate to make good on his deportation promise starting in January.

And that gives illegal aliens a couple of months to get out while the getting is good.

Mitt Romney was widely mocked during his 2012 run for the White House when he said he supported “self-deportation” as the way to reduce the illegal population. This approach, which my own Center for Immigration Studies pioneered as “attrition through enforcement,” was described by Romney as “people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.”

There’s more to it than just that, but the point is to get illegal aliens to return home on their own by making it impractical to stay. Romney took it too far, plaintively protesting that “we’re not going to round people up,” when, in fact, some significant number of people will have to be taken into custody and forcibly removed.

But the basic idea is sound. Persuading illegal aliens to go home on their own saves the government time and money.

Beyond that, which way forward? This:

Or this?

Or a bit of both?