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.

The election results do nothing to contradict these findings. Using the grading system of Americans for Better Immigration, a pro-control lobbying group, we find that about 10 percent of Republicans with an "A" grade lost, while 25 percent of those with an F grade lost. Looking at Rep. Tom Tancredo's pro-enforcement Immigration Reform Caucus, we see that about 7 percent of Caucus members lost, compared with more than 11 percent of all Republicans. The pro-enforcement slant of these results may just be a matter of circumstance, but it certainly doesn't point to any repudiation of a strong stance on immigration.

The anti-Republican wave did overwhelm some enforcement supporters, like John Hostettler (with an immigration-control grade of A-) and Charles Taylor (A), but also amnesty promoters like Mike De Wine (D) and Lincoln Chafee (F). Likewise, the winners included both prominent hawks--Tancredo (A) and Brian Bilbray (A+)--and doves--Richard Lugar (D-).

Among those vying for open seats, Rick O'Donnell in Colorado ran in part on a tough immigration platform and lost, while Peter Roskam in Illinois had a similarly tough approach and won.

The claim for a pro-amnesty mandate rests chiefly on the defeat of two restrictionist House candidates in Arizona, J. D. Hay worth and Randy Graf. The L. A. Times opined that by not electing these two men, "the voters of Arizona have pushed a comprehensive solution one step closer to reality."

The defeat of these two somewhat strident voices may well suggest that a monomaniacal focus on illegal immigration, to the exclusion of all else, cannot compensate for other disadvantages, especially in the face of the national trend against Republicans. But at the same time they were voting for the Democrats in these races (both of whom took pains to sound tough on enforcement), Arizona voters also approved four tough immigration-related ballot measures by huge margins. The measures, all approved by about three to one, will deny bail to illegal aliens, bar illegals from winning punitive damages, bar illegals from receiving state subsidies for education and child care, and declare English the state's official language. The people have spoken, indeed.

Something similar happened in Colorado. Bob Beauprez's loss in the gubernatorial race has been portrayed as a defeat for the immigration hawks, but voters also approved two pro-enforcement ballot measures, one to deny state-income-tax deductibility for wages paid to illegals, the other to instruct the state's attorney general to sue the federal government to demand enforcement of the immigration laws.

What's more, if legalizing illegals is so widely supported by the electorate, how come no Democrats campaigned on it? On the contrary, the immigration positions of a number of successful Democratic challengers might as well have been written by Tom Tancredo, including those of Brad Ellsworth (the Indiana sheriff who defeated House Immigration Subcommittee chairman John Hostettler), Missouri Senate winner Claire McCaskill, Montana Senate winner Jon Tester, or Congressman-elect Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania.

Even those Democrats nominally committed to "comprehensive" reform stressed enforcement as job one. And neither the national party's "Six for '06" agenda nor the plan for the "first 100 hours" says a word about immigration reform, "comprehensive" or otherwise.

The only exception to the Democrats' "whatever you do, don't talk about the amnesty" approach seems to have been Jim Pederson, who challenged Sen. Jon Kyl (an immigration grade of B) by touting a Bush-McCain-Kennedy-style amnesty and foreign-worker program and even praised the 1986 amnesty, which pretty much everyone now agrees was a catastrophe. He lost.

The last element of the pro-amnesty myth is that the immigration hawks alienated Hispanic voters. The Republican share of that vote did fall, from 38 percent in the last midterm election to 30 percent this time. But, as journalist Steve Sailer points out, the Hispanic vote simply follows the white vote, only more Democratic, and the Republican share of the white vote also fell, from 58 percent in 2002 to 51 percent in 2006.

In sum, the elections showed what everyone should have known: Support for immigration control is not a silver bullet and isn't enough to counteract public dissatisfaction with Republicans over the scandals and Iraq. But if Democratic leaders buy into the myth of an amnesty mandate, they'll be in for a big surprise come 2008.

Mr. Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.