The silver lining in a dark immigration vote

A sliver of a silver lining poked out from the U.S. House's anti-immigration-reform vote Wednesday.

The GOP majority approved an appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security that denies any funding for President Barack Obama's executive actions on immigration. That includes the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals of 2012 and last year's action protecting another 4 million people from deportation.

Republicans insisted this wasn't about immigration but about Obama's overreach. No one's buying that. This was about immigration.

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It's a temper tantrum executed from the safety of knowing the bill will never become law. There may not be 51 votes in the Senate, and there certainly aren't the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster.

But that's not the silver lining.

The good news in Wednesday's action came in a vote on the amendment to deny funding for Obama's "dreamer"-lite program. More than two dozen Republicans peeled away to vote no, including freshman Rep. Martha McSally of Tucson. Five more votes and the amendment would have failed.

That's the first official indication of how much support immigration reform may have in the House. These 26 Republicans couldn't bring themselves to lash out at Obama by voting against dreamers, the most sympathetic figures in immigration. That is a sign that positive reform could be achievable.

It's still a long-shot. Obama's executive actions muddied the waters, and the anti-reform hardliners remain the loudest voices in the House. The have powerful allies in the Senate.

But if these moderates can exert themselves and build their ranks, real reform might have a chance.

It might not have the path to citizenship that the Senate bill of 2013 contained. Still, the country would be better off with a bill that modernized immigration law, created guest worker programs, enforced expired visas and brought 11 million to 12 million people out of the shadows with some sort of legal status.

Republicans could defuse a potent issue for Democrats in the 2016 elections and beyond. Business would have the stability of an assured supply of low- and high-skill labor. Law enforcement could turn its attention to dangerous criminals.

And millions of people, with an ever-present threat of deportation removed from their lives, could become even more productive participants in the American economy.

Will it happen? It's a long-shot. But those 26 "no" votes keep the spark alive.