Obama Makes a Token Effort to Stop the Flood at the Border

This is called keeping up appearances. Like the old British show about the woman who pretended to be rich, Barack Obama is pretending to care about the rule of law. In Keeping Up Appearances, the lady of the middle class government worker’s house named Bucket pronounced the name boo-kay and hid her grim, lower class family while she planned candlelight teas that no one really wanted to attend. The pretend rich lady was a fraud.

Obama makes a phone call to hide his indifference to Americans and to the oath he took to faithfully execute all of our laws.

President Obama told his Mexican counterpart in a phone call Thursday that immigrants crossing into the U.S. illegally won’t qualify for legalized status or deferred deportation, including children.

The White House said Mr. Obama and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto discussed “a regional strategy” to address the surge of unaccompanied children coming from Central America, through Mexico, to the U.S.

Whatever Nieto’s role in the flood — and as president of Mexico, he has some role in not stopping it — Obama talking to him about it won’t do much. And Obama knows that.

Sure, Mexico could clamp down on its southern border, if it could control its own officials and law enforcement. But Mexico does a pretty poor job of that on a good day. On a bad day, which is most, its special forces are among the country’s deadliest drug cartels.

With thousands of children trying to enter the U.S. illegally in recent months, Vice President Joseph R. Biden will visit Guatemala on Friday.

Mr. Biden will warn officials and parents that illegal immigration is dangerous and that youth won’t be allowed to stay in the U.S.

That’s a little better, but…it’s Biden. Keeping up appearances…

The message needs to come from Obama, it needs to be broadcast in the media and social media in these countries. It needs to be strong, clear, and unequivocal. It needs to be sustained over a period of time, not a weekend. It needs to be backed up by a show of force at the border — more boots on the ground for enforcement — and a show of unity in Washington on the principle that we will enforce our laws.

These are all things that Biden and Obama will not do.

For all this little show does, the border crisis is useful to Obama. It’s starting to provoke action from Texas officials. It’s going to start provoking hot rhetoric from border activists, which may cement more of the Hispanic vote to the Democrats. It’s already motivating some on the left to push for even more amnesty — i.e. lawlessness. And it may produce actual, illegal votes for the Democrats for decades to come. Or legal votes, if some Democrats get their way.

And it’s hollowing out the Border Patrol from within.

Obama could stop or at least slow all of this with the sustained media push that I described above. He’s a media savvy, YouTube president. He knows what he’s not doing, and why.