By Karoun Demirjian, CQ Staff

Although the candidates are not acknowledging it, Washington’s immigration debate is poised to shift onto new ground. That’s because the campaign-ready mantra that emerged out of the failure of last summer’s failed congressional immigration plan — “secure the borders first” — is giving way to widespread economic anxiety.

The new policy landscape will afford the next president an opportunity to recast the immigration debate in some significant ways — even as he will have to tread carefully in assembling new coalitions in Congress and upgrading the White House’s administrative handling of immigration policies.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama endorse a broad “comprehensive” approach to overhauling the immigration system, combining an eventual path to citizenship for many of the more than 12 million workers already in the country illegally with revamped measures to monitor future influxes of foreign workers. But regardless of who wins the White House, the next president will have to jump-start the debate on immigration beyond the tentative consensus on border enforcement each candidate now touts on the stump.

In part, that will involve addressing economic tensions already emerging in today’s immigration debate. Even before the September credit meltdown, the immigration enforcement arms of the government were shifting their efforts away from the border per se and toward the “magnets” of illegal immigration — workplaces that hire undocumented workers en masse.

Without a clear path forward on the various measures in the comprehensive plan that Congress voted down last summer, the Department of Homeland Security elected to target the economic demand for immigrant labor within U.S. borders. Hence, the recent run of high-profile raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the slaughterhouse industry of Postville, Iowa, and at a Laurel, Miss., plant making electrical equipment.

Now, however, with the specter of a long-term economic downturn, this improvised workplace-driven consensus on immigration enforcement may not hold. As small-business credit seizes up and unemployment increases, going after businesses providing jobs — no matter how poorly paid, underground or unsafe those jobs may be — is not playing well among most constituencies, apart from hard-line immigration opponents. Indeed, lobbyists and managers in other potentially vulnerable companies — such as high-tech concerns and seasonal industries — are already contending that they need access to specialized non-U.S. workers now more than ever.

Still, if the effort to secure the border first is receding somewhat from the immigration debate, it’s far from clear what package of proposals will take shape next. Many observers suggest that some of the measures that the 110th Congress did approve could come under renewed budgetary scrutiny as their mandates expire — such as the 670-mile stretch of concrete fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, which was supposed to be completed by the end of 2008, but now is more than $400 million over budget and just barely half-finished.

The next White House will also inherit a badly overburdened immigration court system, which is charged with processing the deportation and amnesty proceedings for the hundreds of workers swept up in the mass raids. Even comparatively noncontroversial measures such as employer verification of citizenship for recently hired workers involves close coordination of databases from such agencies as the Social Security Administration, which has created a good deal of mischief for the DHS officials administering the “E-Verify” program mandated for use among all contractors with the federal government.

And all of these measures will cost money — hundreds of millions of dollars, by the most conservative estimates — at a time when federal revenue will be contracting on a significant scale. That makes it, in turn, all the more incumbent on either McCain or Obama to forge a renewed political consensus behind such a plan.

A Reclamation Project

In one respect, the bleak economic climate could aid the next president in making the case for a comprehensive immigration plan: A slowing economy will reduce demand for immigrant labor and create some attrition in the ranks of the undocumented workforce. Stronger Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress — which the present election cycle is on pace to deliver — could also reduce open dissension on a comprehensive plan.

The trick will be for the next president to mint these propitious conditions for a comprehensive plan into a sense of legislative urgency. Right now, many congressional supporters of a comprehensive approach are sitting on their hands until a package of overhauls to their liking materializes. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, for example, has pronounced a de facto moratorium on any piecemeal immigration measure, such as new border crackdowns or visa overhauls, until a comprehensive plan swings back into motion.