The word on immigration: voters didn't say yes to amnesty.

THE 2006 election has already had pernicious consequences. One of them is the emergence of the view--eagerly peddled by open-borders advocates--that congressional Republicans' commitment to immigration enforcement was a central reason for their defeat. A corollary is that the election results are clear evidence of the public's support for legalization of illegal aliens ("amnesty" to you and me) plus huge increases in future immigration.

These claims are absurd--the result of either disingenuousness or credulous wishful thinking. It became clear even before the election that Republicans were going to get thumped because of scandals and Iraq, so the open-borders crowd got started early in trying to shape public perceptions. In a Foreign Affairs article before the vote, indefatigable amnesty promoter Tamar Jacoby, from the Manhattan Institute, eagerly anticipated a Republican defeat: "The political stars will realign, perhaps sooner than anyone expects, and when they do, Congress will return to the task it has been wrestling with: how to translate the emerging consensus into legislation to repair the nation's broken immigration system." (This consensus has been "emerging" for years now, like the joke says about Brazil--it's the country of the future, and always will be.)

Writing in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria demonstrated that he shared Jacoby's cluelessness about Flyover Land: "The great obstacle to immigration reform has been a noisy minority.... Come Tuesday, the party will be over. CNN's Lou Dobbs and his angry band of xenophobes will continue to rail, but a new Congress, with fewer Republicans and no impending primary elections, would make the climate much less vulnerable to the tyranny of the minority."

After the results were in, the spinning continued. Jacoby, in The Weekly Standard, denounced "far-right" groups motivated by "xenophobia" and those who engaged in "demagoguery" over this "wedge issue." But even she wasn't so detached from reality as to claim a mandate for amnesty, acclaiming the election instead as "opening the political space for better, more pragmatic policy."

Most of her confederates haven't been so circumspect. From Linda Chavez and Fred Barnes to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, the conclusion of the smart set is that the public has voted for an amnesty for illegal aliens. In Chavez's words, "Now that the people have spoken, maybe Congress will finally listen and pass comprehensive immigration reform."

Apparently, the pro-amnesty side has started believing the results from the hilariously skewed polling on this subject--which often employs such pro-amnesty code words as "comprehensive reform" and "earned legalization," and offers respondents only the Hobson's choice of mass deportations or amnesty. The most recent example of this genre was the exit poll that asked: "Should most illegal immigrants working in the United States be: 1. Offered a chance to apply for legal status 2. Deported to the country they came from." With only these two options, the results were 57-38 in favor of amnesty.

More responsible polling finds something very different. A pre-election survey by the polling company (that's their name; the poll was sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies) used neutral language and offered all three choices of what to do about the existing illegal population, namely: legalization (a policy "that allows illegal immigrants to stay and earn their way to permanent residence and citizenship"), deportation (a "large scale effort to round up and deport illegal immigrants"), or finally, the House Republicans' approach ("a policy that strictly enforces immigration laws and causes illegal immigrants to go home over time"). When presented with the full range of choices, the House approach, sometimes called "attrition through enforcement," won out with 44 percent, while 20 percent wanted deportations, and 31 percent preferred amnesty. So there is definitely a certain level of support for amnesty (we found about the same level in a May poll conducted by Zogby), but the public still prefers enforcement by two to one.