One other thought on President Obama’s election-year amnesty by executive fiat: while this announcement was made with politics in mind, it isn’t actually a new administration policy. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano informed Senate Democrats of this shift in a letter last August. I wrote about it for Chronicles last year, in addition to some mentions I made on this site:

In an August 18 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 21 other Democratic senators, Napolitano acknowledged that removing people from the country simply for being illegal immigrants was no longer an “enforcement priority” of the Obama administration….

Napolitano also indicated that federal immigration authorities aren’t going to do anything about illegal immigrants who would have benefited from the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors), a targeted amnesty that according to one estimate would have legalized 1.3 million people (not counting the parents of those the bill would have amnestied).

Anybody who ever read the amnesty memos can’t be shocked.