Obama puts politics first, border security second

All you need to do is look at the headlines out of Central America to see why tens of thousands of children are ending up at our border. Except there's one hitch: These headlines are very old.

Something else is going on. To be sure, this doesn't mean the children at the border aren't fleeing horrible conditions, violence and poverty. But horrible conditions are not new to Central America.

In other words, the new variable isn't what's happening down there, it's what's happened up here.

President Barack Obama likes to claim that he's deported a lot of people. What he's done is count people caught and turned around at the border as 'deportations.” Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April, 'expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40 percent since 2009.”

Obama has been even more generous to the kids of illegal immigrants, sometimes called 'dreamers.” He unilaterally - some would say illegally - granted permanent resident status to any kids who've been living here a while and who came here under the age of 16.

That's not to say that those kids don't deserve our sympathy or help. But the fact remains those decisions had consequences this administration was utterly unprepared to deal with.

Some of my friends on the right think the border crisis is some grand political scheme of Obama's. I think that's wrong. Buffeted by scandals and the growing realization that he is out of his depth, the last thing he needed was this tragic spectacle on the border.

These immigrants aren't fools. They're responding rationally to new information; if you make it past the border, you can stay. If you're a kid, all you have to do is make it to the border.

That's why conservatives are wrong when they suggest more border guards will solve this crisis. The kids are turning themselves in to the border guards. Adding more guards is like adding more staff to the reception desk at a hotel.