Today Politico Arena asks:

Does the level of support for Arizona’s immigration law demonstrate that immigration can be a potent campaign issue in the 2010 midterms?

My response:

Few national issues produce more heat and less light than immigration, as the reaction to Arizona’s recent legislation on the subject demonstrates. And with nearly three-quarters of Americans now saying they approve of allowing police to ask for documents, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll, and the Arizona law’s approval-disapproval rating at nearly 2 to 1, it’s hard to imagine that immigration will not be a factor in the coming elections.

The issues surrounding the immigration debate — criminal, economic, social — are often complex, and not always clear. But the underlying issue is clear: We no longer control our southern border, and Congress seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It hardly needs saying that a welfare state, in the age of terrorism, cannot have open borders. If the failure to control is partly a function of our substantive law — the absence of a serious guest-worker program, for example — then that needs to be corrected. But it needs to be done in concert with serious enforcement.

Yet what was President Obama’s response to the Arizona law, which at bottom was a call to Washington to do something? It was to ask the Justice Department to look for any legal problems in the law and to respond accordingly. It was to play the presumed political card, that is, rather than to address the underlying issue, which he’d promised to do during his campaign for the presidency. Well if the Pew numbers are any indication, this “master politician” may have once again, as with ObamaCare, misread his mandate and the public mood. For a growing number of Americans, as recent elections have shown, November can’t come soon enough.