A column in Politico begins thusly:

Immigration is becoming for the 2008 election what affirmative action/racial preferences was 15 years ago — the kind of emotional wedge issue that offers Republicans a way to split rank-and-file Democrats from their leaders.

This is certainly possible, but the Democrats aren’t idiots. Democrat Heath Shuler’s enforcement-only bill, the SAVE Act (H.R. 4088), now has 106 co-sponsors and, according to Numbers USA, the endorsement of the National Federation of Independent Business (the small-business lobby), and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. And now Sen. Pryor has introduced the same bill in the Senate. I hear that some in the House Democrat leadership want to move the Shuler bill, precisely to avoid letting immigration become a wedge issue — which is also why the Republican leadership is cool to it.

I’m not getting my hopes up too high, but what a difference a year makes — last November the White House saw in the Democratic takeover of Congress “interesting opportunities” for amnesty, and now that same Congress may actually pass an enforcement bill almost as good as the one the Republican House passed in December 2005.