In mulling John McCain’s primary victory, Jim Antle identifies a larger political problem for restrictionism, though I think his diagnosis is off:

Nevertheless, McCain’s miraculous Houdini-like escape was a bitter disappointment for patriotic immigration reformers. And it is inescapably part of a larger pattern.
Many reformers believe immigration is a transformational issue in American politics. Some have gone so far as to predict it has the potential to upend the current two-party system. The demographic changes wrought by the post-1965 wave of continuous mass immigration are already transforming our politics.
So why are so many more McCain-like disappointments than Brewers and Wilsons? McCain’s trick isn’t even new: he did much the same thing in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries only to swing back to his pro-amnesty position in the general.
It’s time to face what Al Gore might call “an inconvenient truth”: the patriotic immigration reform movement’s recent gains have obscured setbacks in important areas of the debate.
Over the course of the past decade, the intensity of public feeling about immigration has grown. The Minutemen and their fellow travelers are engaged in grassroots activism comparable to that of the pro-life movement. In fact, their citizen border patrols are in some way reminiscent of pro-life sidewalk counselors outside abortion clinics. (Certainly, the smears against both groups are similar.)
Yet it is impossible to imagine pro-lifers voting in large numbers for a candidate with a long, public record of support for legal abortion, much less one of the country’s leading pro-choice advocates, simply because he cut a few television ads saying nice things about fetuses.

Antle’s diagnosis:

And abortion is just one example. Conservative voters focused on taxes or gun rights or opposing gay marriage behave no differently. Even when their Beltway organizations go wobbly, the grassroots usually hold firm.
So why is this not the case with immigration? Why have immigration patriots in the GOP allowed John McCain to get away with something that pro-lifers would not allow Giuliani or Romney to get away with?
My view: these other activists have simple and specific programs. Pro-lifers want to overturn Roe v. Wade and expand legal protection for unborn children. Second Amendment activists want to defeat gun control legislation. Taxpayer groups want candidates to pledge not to raise taxes.
But many restrictionist-leaning voters have only an inchoate sense that they don’t like what mass immigration has done to their country.
This means that all candidates need to do to appeal to many such voters is promise to secure the borders and pretend to oppose amnesty. Because the incipient restrictionists lack a systematic policy agenda, they can be tricked by McCain appearing in an ad with a border-town sheriff in a way that a rank-and-file NRA member is unlikely to be persuaded by Harry Reid posing with a shotgun (the NRA leadership is another story).

His prescription:

The challenge for patriotic immigration reformers is to connect the vague sense that unchecked immigration is damaging the country with a real agenda to do something about it—not just in the minds of policy wonks or internet-based activists, but in the consciousness of voters. The repeated defeat of amnesty shows this should be possible: The various incarnations of McCain-Kennedy contained as much border-security window dressing as McCain’s television commercials, but immigration patriots were able to show that these security enhancements were insufficient or illusory.
And patriotic immigration reformers need a concrete legislative agenda. Weasel words about border security and fences simply cannot suffice.
A genuine commitment to attrition through enforcement—actually working toward a gradual reduction of the illegal presence in the United States—must be an absolute litmus test. The incentives for illegal immigration, ranging from birthright citizenship to the jobs magnet, have to be addressed. Increases in immigration levels—including legal immigration—must be as verboten as an increase in taxes. A moratorium, at least for the duration of the recession, should be the immigration equivalent of the no-new-taxes pledge.

Antle’s policy specifics make sense, but I think he misidentifies the problem. Grassroots restrictionists already support all of this.

The real problem the immigration-reduction movement faces (and “reduction” is the right word, because even those focused on illegal immigration alone want to reduce the arrival of foreigners from abroad by hundreds of thousands a year) is that it doesn’t fit neatly into the left-right paradigm of our politics. The pro-life and Second Amendment and anti-tax folks are firmly, and almost exclusively, on the right — they’re an integral and inherent part of the conservative movement.

But the immigration issue doesn’t roll that way. A large share of the elite right, whether the corporate people or the libertarians, are actively and openly on the other side of the immigration issue from actual Republican voters. That’s true on other issues, of course — pro-pornography libertarians, for instance, or businesses trying to grab at corporate welfare or pro-choice east coast Rockefellerites — but in such cases those interests generally understand they need to keep their heterodox opinions to themselves and accept a subordinate status on those issues. But on immigration, the elite holders of heterodox open-borders opinions insist that they be considered orthodox and that supporters of American sovereignty be anathematized.

At the same time, there are significant elements on the left, at least left-ish, who are restrictionists and are sometimes uncomfortable making common cause with people with different views on abortion or taxes or whatever.

So until immigration politics is clarified as a partisan, ideological issue, with virtually all Republicans on one side, we’re going to continue with the current stalemate. If Antle’s concrete legislative agenda can help move matters in that direction, so much the better, but a lack of concrete-ness isn’t our problem.