Now that Amnesty John appears to have the Republican nomination sewn up, the pro-McCain commentariat is seeking to rewrite the lessons of last summer’s epic battle over immigration in the Senate. That unprecedented outpouring of popular outrage, which stopped cold the combined force of all of America’s elite institutions, clearly demonstrated the arrival of immigration as a potent political issue.

With the recent primary victories of Ted Kennedy’s amnesty co-conspirator, supporters of the McCain approach are crowing that last summer’s humiliating defeat was just a flash in the pan, driven by noisy troublemakers who can now safely be ignored. Jennifer Rubin at Contentions claims that immigration “has had a perfect record of irrelevance,” while Richelieu at the Weekly Standard smirks that “hanging out with the anti-immigrant Bund seems to be a kiss of death.”

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Even our own David Frum, an immigration critic himself, is afraid that “A McCain win will be interpreted as a repudiation of the case for immigration restriction” — if the Senate’s most outspoken exponent of open borders can survive a Republican presidential primary, then almost no position on immigration is untenable in Republican debate.

Obviously, McCain’s successes are being interpreted in this way, but is that reading of the situation defensible? I would argue that it is not.

Immigration is certainly not “the most important issue in the history of the planet,” as John Podhoretz wrote sarcastically last month. In selecting a candidate, voters consider a variety of factors, including (but certainly not limited to) political positions. Moreover, even when political positions prominently figure into a decisions made by voters, the importance of certain issues relative to the other issues in play varies from voter to voter.

Historically, immigration has not typically been an issue of prominence. Over the past few years, however, that has begun to change; this constitutes a sign of the increasing political saliency of immigration. A sign of that saliency is precisely the tailspin that McCain’s campaign went into after the amnesty debacle-money dried up, his staff hemorrhaged, and his reporter friends started writing him off. McCain’s subsequent comeback is a testament to many things, but the very fact that such a comeback was even necessary demonstrates the potency of the issue.

Moreover, McCain’s move to the right on immigration (at least rhetorically) since the failure of his amnesty bill provides further evidence of the sustained significance of immigration, a move that is manifested by his pledge to secure the borders “first” (though the corollary is that he would then have an amnesty, something people often don’t hear). As John O’Sullivan notes, “one of the endearing things about McCain is his inability to pander in a convincing way,” so many people don’t believe his claims to have “seen the light” on immigration. On the other hand, many do. For instance, the California exit polls showed that 29 percent of those who favored mass deportation of illegals as the solution to illegal immigration voted for McCain. (Deportation supporters made up a plurality — 38 percent — of California Republican primary voters.) With most people completely unaware of McCain’s deeply held ideological multiculturalism, it’s no surprise that voters tuning into the race only a few days before the contest could be taken in by McCain’s pretense.

The rest of the Republican field further bolsters the claim that the immigration issue resonates with voters. Initially, Reps. Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter seemed the only hawkish candidates on immigration; however, the rest of the candidates quickly followed suit. Romney, after seeming open to amnesty in 2005, came out against it and repeatedly attacked Giuliani for presiding over a sanctuary city while mayor of New York. Giuliani saw that he needed to sound tough, so he came out against the Senate amnesty bill last summer and told audiences, “I could end illegal immigration in three years.” Mike Huckabee’s comments as Arkansas governor in support of illegal immigrants led many to think that he would clone McCain on the issue — but instead he modeled his immigration platform on an article I’d written for National Review. Fred Thompson explicitly promoted “attrition through enforcement” and, along with Huckabee, actually proposed significant reductions in legal immigration, marking the first time in generations that such has happened in a presidential campaign.