[Misterioso]

The American president has the power to control America's borders if he wants to, but George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not and do not want to, and for the same reason, and we all know what it is. The fastest-growing demographic in America is the Hispanic vote, and if either party cracks down on illegal immigration, it risks losing that vote for generations.

That's right. Keep everyone thinking it's about voting when it's really about drugs. Drug money is keeping the borders undefended. Drug money is the taboo subject the media ignores. Wonder why.

[Cicero]

Agreed, but not mutually exclusive. Illegal immigration gives a lot of powerful people:

a) Votes;

b) Drug money;

c) cheap labor and contributions from businesses that want cheap labor.

[Sybeck1]

It all about pissing off the Hispanics. Where will the GOP be if its pisses off the angry white man?

[lentulusgracchus]

Keep everyone thinking it's about voting when it's really about drugs.

Only partly. It's partly about drug money, partly about wage-breaking by employers, and partly about, yup, votes.

It's deeply cynical. Except for the drug dimension, it also represents the status quo ante before the 1925 immigration reforms. Lyndon Johnson kicked that apart -- for votes.

Once, he had done it for cheap ag labor for his Texas-millionaire buddies, back in the 1950's when he tried to hornswoggle President Eisenhower and hold the gates open, but when he did it in 1965, he was President, and he did it because he knew he'd become Scalawag-in-Chief by signing the 1965 Civil Rights Bill that made white people in 11 Southern States second-class citizens -- no, wait, third-class (second-class was what everyone else became), by stripping them of the power to hold elections under their own authority, and instead forcing them to seek a pass from the Justice Department -- making them lickspittles of LBJ Justice, which they disliked.