Richard Neustadt's classic analysis Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan emphasized that presidents, for all their advisors and supporters, ultimately must rely on themselves to accomplish their policy purposes. He called this need self-help and every successful president has made use of it.

In Neustadt's analysis, self-help is used to further the president's major policy preferences, not the president's primarily personal and political self-interest. Where the latter begins and the former ends, however, is not always easy to discern. And that is especially the case for presidents like Mr. Obama, who consider themselves to be great historical figures. Read more...

The president's reelection and historical legacy were hanging in the balance. Half measures wouldn't do and hadn't worked.

President Obama had tried to build his credibility by presenting himself as being serious on immigration enforcement in order to get Republican help on passing major immigration reform. But he undercut that effort by putting into place a series of executive actions that narrowed and limited immigration enforcement: Read more...

President Obama's August 2011 enforcement statement and policy were misleading because he couched this major policy change as a response to "limited resources". This was not true, but that did not keep it from being repeated. For example, in December 2011 a DHS spokesperson was quoted as saying that his agency "has implemented immigration enforcement priorities that focus limited resources on convicted criminals, repeat immigration law violators, fugitives, and recent entrants." (emphasis added) Read more...

Caught between his ambitions and his circumstances, the president tried to present himself as unusually strict on immigration enforcement.

However, he failed to convince Republicans whose help he needed to pass an immigration bill in order to cement his appeal to the Spanish-speaking-descent community. They saw the administration's increasing use of discretion as questionable, at minimum. Read more...

Time and circumstances were closing in on President Obama in 2011. The presidential election was fast approaching. He had no major accomplishments to his credit that the public supported. Enthusiasm among his ardent supporters had waned and skepticism about his leadership efforts among the general public had increased. Read more...

The president was caught in a bind. He had promised that immigration reform would be one of his top agenda items during his first year in office, or at least his first term, and it wasn't. What's more, activists from the Spanish-background community were angry that he had broken his promise. They pushed him to make a commitment to immigration "reform", which, in their minds and his, required a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11.5 million illegal aliens living and working in the United States. Read more...

Heading into his 2012 reelection campaign, the president had a large problem. He had managed to accrue only a mediocre record of accomplishment in the area that mattered most to most Americans — the economy. Moreover, the president's policies and, in some cases the lack of same, had diminished the enthusiasm of several groups that had been among his staunch supporters in his first presidential campaign.

One of these groups consisted of legal American residents with roots in Spanish-speaking countries. Hispanics, it was endlessly repeated, were America's fastest growing ethnic group and that their presence in large numbers in the so-called swing states made them an important constituency to engage, and a crucial one for the president to win. Read more...

Given the poor state of the economy, the president's reelection prospects in 2012 were uncertain. His most fervent supporters still adored him, but there were fewer of them. And many others questioned whether he had been successful in addressing their number one concern — the economy.

However, not every voting group cared only about the economy. Members of the community from Spanish-speaking backgrounds cared a great deal about the economy, but also immigration reform because it touched so many members of their community. Read more...

No one expects a president up for reelection not to make use of the benefits of his office. One of them is to announce new examples of federal largess, be they grants for a "promising neighborhood" program; "a major expansion of Skills for America's Future, an industry-led initiative to dramatically improve industry partnerships with community colleges and build a nation-wide network to maximize workforce development strategies, job training programs, and job placements"; or plans to "Win the Future" by making grants for better energy efficiency.

What Americans do not expect is that their president will abruptly and summarily subvert the administrative machinery of the executive branch to further his own reelection prospects. But that is exactly what President Obama did. Read more...

The revelations concerning the Obama administration's dissembling regarding its preparedness and response to the tragic and avoidable American deaths at Benghazi, the substantial efforts to secretly comb though reporters' communications — both personal and professional — and the IRS' blatant efforts to single out conservative groups for broad and intrusive scrutiny has justifiably called attention to how important it is that the government "do what's right" to borrow a phrase from a trust in government poll question. Read more...

With all the good will that greeted Barack Obama's historic election as president, he assumed office at the end of a long period of decline in the public's confidence in its government. And he knew it.

Dan Balz, a reporter for the Washington Post wrote this in 2010: Read more...

The process through which the Senate's immigration bill was developed and amendments for it were considered and discarded at a rapid pace is unfolding in the context of a genuine trust crisis in the American civic culture.

Over the past half-century, Americans have become increasingly distrustful and skeptical of their government, especially at the national level. Read more...

Trust in government represents a leap of faith on the part of Americans, especially when it comes to large, complex, and extremely consequential policy legislation like the immigration bill now before Congress. That leap of faith actually consists of dual parts of hope and confidence.

Trust rests on the hope that our leaders are acting in good faith and putting forward immigration proposals in the public interest and not primarily partisan policy proposals. It also depends on confidence that an expectation of fairness and evenhandedness in the policy debate process has not been misplaced. Read more...

We are often reminded that America is diverse country held together by a commitment to a creedal core and that is partially true. But it is also a country held together by a common cultural heritage and the set of premises and institutions that follow from it. And, finally but crucially, it also is bound together by the feelings of emotional attachment that the members of America's national community feel toward the country, its public institutions, and to some degree each other. Read more...

Democrats and many Republicans view the current immigration legislation now being considered in Congress primarily through a political prism. For Democrats, the new legislation presents the opportunity to add many millions of new immigrants — sympathetic to their party's perspective of larger and more "helpful" government — to the country's voting rolls and thus help bring about their dream of a permanent Democratic majority. Read more...

Political observers have long been aware that major policy stakeholder groups "justify and package their interests in terms of the common good", thereby supporting and enhancing their power positions. There would be no reason to suppose that the current Senate immigration legislation is any exception. And it isn't. Read more...

At its core, the fundamental problem of the Gang of Eight's legislation is that it thinks it has arrived at the country's national interest by a secret process of narrow-gauge bargaining among special interests. It has not.

Large businesses want a reliable supply of cheap labor beyond the one million-plus new immigrants that the country already admits every year. So they bargain for tens of thousands more low-skill "guest workers". There is however, nothing temporary about these workers since they will be able to apply for green cards. Read more...

One question before the American people is whether the legislative substance of what the "Gang of Eight" has presented lives up to its loftily stated ideals.

The sentiments are stirring, and beyond reproach. Who could be against securing "the sovereignty of the United States of America"? Who would oppose keeping "our country safe and prosperous"? And what critic of the current immigration system would rail against "establishing a safe, just, and efficient immigration system"? Read more...

In 1990 Congress authorized a bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by then-Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), hereafter the Jordan Commission. The Commission was mandated "to review and evaluate the implementation and impact of U.S. immigration policy and to transmit to the Congress reports of its findings and recommendations." Read more...

The so-called "Gang of Eight" senators have released their plan for "comprehensive immigration reform" — The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. A comprehensive immigration bill, if enacted, would constitute, for better or worse, the most fundamental change to American immigration law since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act). Read more...

Editor's Note: View a listing of the entire series

Mischaracterizing the effort to ensure that only persons who are legally entitled to work here are able to do so as "punitive", is one method by which legalization advocates, including the Washington Post, try to stack the deck against the "fair, cogent, and economically rational" immigration policies they purportedly support. Read more...

Editor's Note: View a listing of the entire series

The Washington Post's tendentious and inaccurate editorial calls Mitt Romney's immigration views incoherent.

They are not; they are entirely consistent, and what's more, if you think about them clearly and carefully they make very good logical and policy sense. Read more...

Editor's Note: View a listing of the entire series

The Washington Post's erroneous assertion about Mitt Romney having laid claim to his father's Mexican heritage for political purposes, and his supposed lack of specificity, is simply a warm-up for its real complaint about the GOP presidential nominee. Read more...

Editor's Note: View a listing of the entire series

The Washington Post's editorial department is up in arms that Mitt Romney has not put forward a detailed blueprint "to solve … America's broken immigration system". Read more...

Editor's Note: View a listing of the entire series

The Washington Post is out with a tendentious and inaccurate editorial decrying Mitt Romney's "immigration incoherence".

The Post's editorial begins with what it believes is a putdown, but which actually turns out to make a point in Mr. Romney's favor that it didn't intend. It brings up Mr. Romney's joke before a group of contributors: "'I say that jokingly,' said the Republican presidential nominee, who plainly wasn’t joking at all, 'but it would be helpful to be Latino.'" Read more...

In a recent analysis of immigration, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker had this to say about the motivation for immigration: Read more...

At its most sympathetic, the amnesty trap is predicated on the assumption that it is understandable that those choosing to live and work in the United States in violation of our immigration laws do so because illegal aliens only want a better life for themselves and their families. This resonates with most Americans because as a country and culture we are sympathetic to the plight of those who are struggling. Read more...

The necessity to legalize illegal aliens is one basic, irreducible premise of immigration "grand bargains". This is, when you think of it, a rather odd asymmetric policy and ethical stance. The political, policy, and moral elements of enforcing American immigration laws stand on much firmer ground than efforts to legalize illegal aliens. Read more...

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) is legitimately seen as a failure by those favoring enforcement of American laws and by many Americans more generally. Additionally, conservatives look back and see themselves as having been deceived. Read more...

Americans love compromise. It's in their cultural and historical DNA. Even better, it is entirely consistent with their wish and support of anything that seems "fair".

Americans expect and support hard bargaining, but when the differences have been narrowed, what better way to reach an agreement than to "split the difference"? When you've reached that point where it seems there isn't that much separating you, walking away on principle seems churlish. After all, haven't you already negotiated to the point where you have gotten a good portion of what you wanted? Read more...