No matter who wins the tight special election in Massachusetts, the results will likely render Democrats paralyzed with fear. Indeed, the anti-incumbent sentiment that aided Democrats the last two cycles now threatens to take out a big chunk of the Democratic majorities this coming November, and the governing party has done little to prove it can deliver on campaign promises.

That won’t stop Latino groups from demanding that Congress and the president tackle one of those promises — comprehensive immigration reform. But the once-bipartisan push for reform has shed Republicans as the growing Tea Party movement, hostile to immigrants, enforces its Manichaean purity code. Born of old-school xenophobia and racism, the right-wing anti-immigrant hysteria has been fueled by the GOP’s loss of its once-substantial share of the Latino vote. It’s one thing to hurl invective at a demographic that gave George W. Bush 40 percent of its vote in 2004. It’s a lot easier to do so when that group is seen as a monolithic liberal bloc that broke roughly 70-30 for Obama in 2008 — despite John McCain’s identification as an immigration reformer.

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