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The political mood in Washington seems to have turned against comprehensive immigration reform mostly for tactical reasons in the Republican Party, which may or may not make good sense.

The two big political stories out of the United States in the last week both centre on the Republican Party, but they seem to convey opposing messages. On Tuesday, Republicans in the House of Representatives surrendered unconditionally in the fight over the US debt ceiling. The Republican leadership sent a clean measure for increasing the ceiling, with no conditions, to a vote, knowing that it would pass as it did, 221 to 201, even though most Republicans still voted against.

But in the other story, prospects for the passage of immigration reform have dwindled, as Republicans increasingly shy away from the idea. A brief flurry of optimism was put to rest last Thursday when speaker John Boehner all but ruled out agreement on a measure this year.

Its been a while since we looked at immigration reform, of which the key point is the attempt to open up a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico. In the middle of last year things looked reasonably positive, but the mood soon turned. Its been up and down since then, but a consensus has now emerged that nothing is likely to happen until after mid-term congressional elections in November.

There has never been any likelihood that the majority of Republicans would actually embrace reform. The question is whether the majority would be sufficiently tolerant of the idea to allow a reform bill to come to a vote in the House, where a few Republicans would vote with the majority of Democrats to pass it.

That in turn depends on how worried the Republicans are about their standing with non-white voters, especially Hispanics. Last weeks change of heart seems to have been substantially driven by a sense of optimism that the party is doing well enough to not need to concern itself too much with reaching out beyond its traditional voter base, and that the attempt to do so could be a dangerous distraction.

Quoting Republicans knowledgeable about the issue, a New York Times report said that reaching any agreement has become appreciably harder because of a Republican reluctance to get caught up in an internal feud and stomp on their increasingly bright election prospects.

Immigration is an emotional issue, so bringing it back to the forefront obviously risks exposing the partys internal tensions. And as has always been the case, theres a tendency from the Republican point of view to see it as a lose-lose issue: if reform fails, they will get the blame, yet the Obama administration will take the credit if it succeeds.

Not everyone thinks the issue is dead. Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic says that Lots of senior Democrats think Boehner still wants a deal, and suggests that he is trying simultaneously to reassure nervous conservatives that he wont cut a bad deal, to give Republicans more leverage should more serious negotiations begin, and to create a handy excuse in case legislation simply proves impossible to achieve.

Its also not clear that the decision if thats what it is to get the midterms out of the way first makes good tactical sense. If the Republicans do as well as theyre hoping, the result will be an influx of new, largely hard-right GOP legislators, who presumably will be even less sympathetic to immigration reform than the current crop. On the other hand, if they do unexpectedly badly, their negotiating position vis-a-vis the administration will just deteriorate further.

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Immigration reform sinking fast in the US | The World is ...