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"I do continue to be a bit more optimistic than you.
If by November the state of play is as follows ...
(1) The House has stymied a guest worker plan ... so essentially no legislation has passed except some increased funding for border security.
(2) The President has actually taken some serious steps to secure the border ... and there is evidence it is working.
(3) We have seen footage of the Guard troops building barriers and fences at critical border crossings.
... then I'm not so sure the absence of a fence will cause mass defections in November.
Now, if guest worker gets through Congress but the fence doesn't ... put me down for the apocalyptic November scenario."

You are more optimistic than me, I think, because I don't think you're giving the proper weight to the BorderBots' sense of being BETRAYED by the Republican leadership and the President.

You've got to put yourself in their shoes. He didn't just say no to most of what they have said they wanted on Monday night: he proposed a policy that makes everything they fear WORSE. No border wall AND no enforcement against employers AND guest workers AND amnesty-which-is-not-called-amnesty.

They saw a positive and willful effort not just to ignore them, but to DELUDE them by pretending to offer the opposite of what is really on the table.

And they were (and are) INCANDESCENT about it.

You're assuming they will cool down and be lulled.

I am very sure that they are just like the tax hawks in 1992. NOTHING BUSH 41 DID after he raised taxes, nothing, could save his presidency. The tax hawks believed they were lied to. They took it personally, and they rejected every overture of reconciliation. They would have accepted a tax CUT as contrition, but of course the one thing that offended them was not on the table.

The BorderBots feel betrayed, and they fully expect flim-flam to try and convince them all is well. They were commenting angrily about the token enforcement against employers, and they responded by posting stats that showed the NON-enforcement against employers for years and years and years, the steady dwindling of enforcement.

Now, you're pinning your hopes on the BorderBots not being as mad as I think they are, and not being as fiercely committed as I know they are, and being more easily duped than they really are.

In short, your optimism is misplaced. If the BorderBots don't get their fence, they're going to retaliate. I am as sure of this as Longstreet was of the disaster that would befall Pickett's Charge. The pieces are all there.

The way to avoid the disaster is to give the BorderBots their fence and start building it. Hell, if you've got to lie to them, DON'T do it by pretending that the thing that they DON'T want, which is partial enforcement and a few national guard here and there is really working! They're not going to be fooled by that.
No, if you're going to lie to them politically, tell them you're fencing the WHOLE border, sea-to-sea (use those words), with an Israeli Wall (provide the image), and then START IT, so they see the pictures. Then they vote for you, you save Congress, and just go at a snail's pace after that.

I don't advocate lying at all in politics, but if we're going to resort to flim-flam, at least aim the flim-flam for MAXIMUM IMPACT! Maximum impact is TELLING PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR, and LOOKING LIKE YOU'RE DOING IT...but then never getting around to quite finishing it in the out years.
That gives people a sense of victory now.
Refusing to give them such a (false) victory on THEIR terms (even if you intend to screw them in the end) but insisting, instead, on doing everything on YOUR terms...and then trying to persuade furiously angry people who hate you that, see, you were right after all...well...that's a good way to see Speaker Pelosi.

Give them their Wall, and we don't have anything to worry about.
If you're going to lie to them, give them their Wall and build part of it, then slow down after the election. (Of course, once you start, they may not let you get away with stopping, but that's THEIR problem - right now the problem is overcoming distrust and anger. You do that by giving the other guy a big thing that he wants.)

I can't be optimistic like you are, because I believe it's a false hope likely to lead to bad choices.

The only way to save the Republican majority in Congress in 2006 is to give the BorderBots their sea-to-sea wall and start visibly throwing it up. Voting for parts of the wall will not do it. You have to say you're building the whole thing.