Consequences of putting politics first

Jonah Goldberg writes:

horrible conditions are not exactly new to Central America.

In other words, the new variable isn’t what’s happening down there, it’s what’s happened up here.

President Obama likes to claim that he’s deported a lot of people. But he hasn’t. What he’s done is count people caught and turned around at the border as “deportations.”

Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April, “expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40 percent since 2009.”

“If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen,” John Sandweg, the former acting head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told the Times.

These immigrants aren’t fools. They’re responding rationally to new information: If you make it past the border, you can stay. If you’re a kid, all you have to do is make it to the border.

But the law didn’t cause the crisis, nor did the violence in Central America. The cause comes from a president who puts politics first.

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