About 60 percent of respondents said they favored the plan proposed by some Republicans in the Senate that would permit illegal immigrants who had worked in the United States for at least two years to keep their jobs and apply for citizenship. Just 35 percent endorsed the view of some conservatives that illegal immigrants should be deported. ~The New York Times

That isn’t overwhelming support for deportation, but the support is surprisingly high considering how little it has been discussed publicly by anyone on any side of the debate. Restrictionists have avoided talking about it for fear of “scaring” away the support of centrist voters for more basic reforms (such as, say, securing the border), and this is probably tactically smart, while their opposite numbers (whom we would call, what, immigration expansionists?) regard deportation as an idea so implausible and alien that it might as well be from beyond the moon. But deportation is what a government does with illegal immigrants. I know of few other areas of policy where we throw up our hands and say, “We can’t possibly enforce this rule, because we would have to enforce it so many times!”

But this makes the dynamic for the GOP this year tricky. They’re alread going to suffer a major shellacking on every other policy front, but on immigration they have something their core voters care about a great deal (even if it might do nothing for them with the proverbial suburban mothers), and it is something they could use to get those voters to the polls if these core voters were afraid enough of what a Bush-Pelosi duo would do on amnesty.

It is not definite, but seems very likely, that this 35% supporting deportation comes almost exclusively from regular GOP voters. To mobilise their base on immigration, the GOP Congress would have to shift dramatically towards that position, even though the current leadership probably would never take up legislation even mentioning deportation. But a leadership full of Bush Republicans, weighed down by false memories of the “disaster of Prop. 187,” would not even consider such a move. Which is why their losses in November are going to be worse than they have to be.