Groundhog Day

President Obama did what he wanted yesterday. Nothing new there. What really changed, though? Think about it:

• He's always been about selective law enforcement and ignoring things that are inconvenient to him. It's been the entire purpose of Eric Holder's career. Same thing for Lois Lerner, Jeh Johnson and everyone else who has ever been in the employ of this administration.
• Will immigrants come out of the shadows? Why would they, really? Once you do, you reveal yourself to the government, assuming you're honest about your actual identity, and you get the privilege of paying taxes on your income. As long as there are people who are willing to pay for work that's off the books, a lot of people will continue to work that way.
• Will border security be increased? Of course not. That could have happened at any point in the previous six years of this administration. Or, to be fair, in the previous 60 years since Eisenhower cracked down on border crossings. There are too many incentives, for too many people, to avoid an actual crackdown. The Chamber of Commerce wants low cost labor and the Democratic Party wants a larger clientele. Nothing new about any of that.
• Most people who claim they don't like cheap labor are selective in their opposition. And we're all complicit in that. I had a new roof put on my house a month or so ago. The work crew that did the work were clearly guys from Mexico or further south into Central America. I talked to a few of them and more than a few couldn't speak English. I speak some Spanish so I was able to figure out what they were talking about as they worked, and it was mostly about the job they were doing. Had I called any roofing contractor in town, I'd have seen similar groups working on the job. On those days that I stop for coffee on the way in to work, I often see similar work crews who are getting coffee as well. They might be roofers, they might be landscapers, they might be painters. That's the way the world works and there's no point in pretending otherwise. I have no idea whether the roofing contractor was employing anyone who was in the country illegally, but it wasn't in my interest to make an inquiry.
• At bottom, this action is a finger in the eye of Obama's political adversaries. The goal is to make the opposition mad, so that they say and do things that can then be portrayed as insensitive, or racist, or violating the sensibilities of the platoons of social justice warriors arrayed across our fair land. It's also a finger in the eye of many of his supporters as well, especially lower income workers who will have more competition for jobs, but Obama doesn't care about that particularly. He does what he does. As do we all.