[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

The departure of Mitt Romney from the presidential campaign ought to lower the decibel level on what loomed as the nastiest wedge issue of 2008: illegal immigration. Although John McCain supported comprehensive reform, then flipped and pleaded mea culpa before the conservatives he's now courting, he obviously understands its complexity. Ditto Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

That hardly means immigration will vanish as an issue: It will be played to a fare-thee-well in a lot of congressional and legislative races, even in city and county races, especially in districts where new immigrants are increasingly visible on the streets and in the malls, but not yet on the voter rolls.

Opponents of illegal immigration have also seized on it in a lot of bills, including the federal State Children's Health Insurance Program, where there could be a claim that some benefit might go to somebody who wasn't supposed to be here.

And there are still the frothers – Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and countless other drive-time talkers who, without questioning or (often) checking the data, retail the stuff of anti-immigration outfits.

The GOP, said Frank Sharry, the head of the National Immigration Forum, which supports comprehensive reform, "is a party that's in the grip of nativism."