My understanding of the Obama administrations attempts to beef up immigration enforcement is that they're both (a) yet another unilateral concession to Republicans and (b) yet another backdoor attempt to persuade business lobbyists to support piece of the Obama agenda. In the same way that the EPA's CO2 emissions rules are designed to make the need for Congress to pass a carbon pricing scheme, tougher enforcement is supposed to convince farmers, meatpackers, construction companies, and the like to get behind some form of normalization for the millions of undocumented workers in this country.
Needless to say, it hasn't worked out so well.
(Photo of immigrants standing in line at Ellis Island from the NYPL collection)
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