The immigration debate has receded from the presidential campaign. Part of a fence along the Arizona border.

TIMOTHY EGAN

TUCSON, ARIZONA
For now, the demagogues have left the stage. Talk radio hosts have moved on - from fear of Mexicans at Home Depot to fear of a black preacher in a pulpit. Representative Tom Tancredo, the antiimmigration leader in Congress, has receded, satisfied that fellow Republicans are trying to out-Tancredo him.
We are left with the 12 million illegal immigrants - hanging Sheetrock, setting sod and cleaning hospital bedpans - as before, in the shadows. But in the two months since immigration briefly dominated the 2008 campaign, much has happened, much of it here.
Arizona may produce the next president, in John McCain, or the next vice president, in Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor. Both of them are shaped by the pragmatic realities of the West - and lessons in how simplistic slogans rarely work as policy.
Begin with the rallying cry of those on the hard-hearted side of this issue: Build the wall. Deport them all. No amnesty.
The wall has hit a wall. You remember the wall, er, fence: nearly 1,100 kilometers of obstruction along the border, promised by year’s end. Nightly, someone with a microphone or a seat in Congress has wondered why we can’t just slap together the mighty divide.
“Show me a 50-foot wall,” says Napolitano, who prosecuted hundreds of illegals before she moved to the Statehouse, and “and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” It’s not just the pull of the world’s largest economy.
The wall has run into a foundation of the modern Republican Party and a bedrock American principle at that: property rights. A federal judge, Andrew Hanen of South Texas, an appointee of George W. Bush and a man with solid Texas values, as Bush likes to say, has put a big roadblock before the fencebuilders. He ruled that the government must adequately compensate property owners before running over their land in the rush to build the wall.
Bad enough, the wall is a curtain to the natural world, to water and sixth-generation family farms that don’t conform to a straight line on a map. But the Bush administration has been suing property owners by the dozens, trying to force them to let the government divide their land.
Now that the bully tactics have backfired, the border will most likely not be fenced by year’s end, if ever. Oh, well.
As for mass deportation, Arizona has proved to be a precursor of how poorly that would work. A strict new law, which Napolitano signed with some regret, would force any business that knowingly hired an undocumented worker to lose its license after two offenses.
Thus far, there have been thousands of tips about people who look like illegal workers, prompting police to chase innumerable bogus complaints. But so far, not a single reported citation. Not even from Phoenix, home of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed toughest lawmen in the West.
Of course, the law has been on the books for only three months. But if they can’t find a single lawbreaker in a state with an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants - a state that is the nation’s busiest gateway for illegal crossings - imagine how hard it would be to round up a population the size of New York City and Los Angeles combined - breaking up families and ruining businesses.
And don’t forget: since 1986, it’s been against federal law for companies to hire illegals. That’ll show them: after 22 years, the total number of prosecutions could fill the breakfast nook at the local restaurant.
Which brings us to amnesty. Senator John McCain, as co-sponsor of the failed federal compromise to offer a path to citizenship, took his hits from the Republican base for his stand. Now, he’s the party’s standard-bearer, and is well liked by Latinos. He will run away from harsh proposals by election-minded Republicans in Congress.
The Democrats may find their vice presidential candidate here with Napolitano - a former federal prosecutor with a portfolio of common-sense ideas on how to fix the border. In the 2006 governor’s race, her opponent in this Republican- leaning state called her soft on immigration. She won every county. Napolitano is a strong supporter of Barack Obama.
In the fall, four states in the American Southwest (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico) will be a treasure trove of electoral votes - worth far more than Ohio, and as much in play as that big swing state. Fantasy liberal talk about porous borders being part of our diversity will not play. Nor will pandering to xenophobes.
But after November, someone from this state is likely to be brokering a deal to at last tackle the immigration problem, which means that sloganeering will remain on bumper stickers, where it belongs.