Obama to open-border types: In another life, I’d be on your side

Two weeks ago, President Obama met with advocates for illegal immigrants to discuss the current border crisis. According to Marshall Fitz, immigration policy director at the Center for American Progress, Obama, the former community organizer, told the group that “in another life, I’d be on the other side of the table.”

Once again, we see Obama the opportunistic autobiographer. This is a man who published his autobiography (albeit partly fictitious) at the age of 34, before he had accomplished much of anything. And stray autobiographical facts — his race, his time lived outside of the U.S., his Harvard education, etc. — continued to substitute for concrete accomplishments as he rose to our highest office, for which he was manifestly unqualified.

Now, with his presidency in tatters, Obama tries to appease critics through assertions about where he would be “in another life.”

I don’t deny, though, that in this case Obama’s assertion is true. In another life, Obama the ultra-leftist community organizer, would be leading the charge for allowing tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children to remain in the U.S. More generally, he would be leading the charge for something approaching open borders.

But when we realize what separates Obama from his “other life” is merely one decade or so and several elections, we should suspect that Obama is still leading that charge, albeit from behind.

After all, Rick Perry warned Obama in 2012 that “there is a surge of unaccompanied illegal minors entering the United States.” Yet the president did nothing. Rep. Ron Barber (D-AZ) acknowledges that the influx of children from Central America “is not a new development” and that Obama “could have acted sooner.”

Moreover, although Obama has talked about repealing the law that grants full adjudicatory hearings to children who enter the U.S. illegally from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — thereby precluding their immediate deportation — the legislation he proposes does not include such repeal.

Who is the real Obama — the one who would be sitting with the radical pro-illegal immigrant lobby or the one who, constrained to some extent by politics, is sitting across the table from them? The question answers itself. So do parallel questions across a broad range of controversial subjects.

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