While the media has focused on immigration reform as a tool that could be used to motivate Hispanics to vote for Democrats… and this may be… it is clear that Obama knows unilateral action is a double edged sword. Had he though, even for a second, that executive action on immigration wouldn’t do more harm than good to Democrat electoral chances then he would have pulled the trigger sometime after Labor Day and relentlessly demagogued the decision before the beating he took on November 4.

While there are electoral and humanitarian issues involved, the old dictum, “money talks, bull**** walks,” applies here.

Everyone knows the US Chamber of Commerce has been pushing hard for immigration reform. They are doing this because it opens up a pipeline of cheap labor for its members and would allow the importation of unconstrained numbers of STEM degree holders from low wage nations to drive down personnel costs for the high tech industry. And increasingly the Chamber, every the servant of big government and rent-seeking as a business model, is more likely to give money to liberal democrats rather than conservatives or free market Republicans.

The main driver of this unseemly push by Obama to wreck an already doddering immigration system is money. Both the money that it takes to organize an astroturf populist movement and the money that ends up in leftwing groups that act as foot soldiers for Democrat politicians. Via the New York Times, The Big Money Behind the Push for an Immigration Overhaul:

A vital part of that expansion has involved money: major donations from some of the nation’s wealthiest liberal foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Open Society Foundations of the financier George Soros, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. Over the past decade those donors have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations, including many fighting for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally. The philanthropies helped the groups rebound after setbacks and financed the infrastructure of a network in constant motion, with marches, rallies, vigils, fasts, bus tours and voter drives. The donors maintained their support as the immigration issue became fiercely partisan on Capitol Hill and the activists intensified their protests, engaging in civil disobedience and brash confrontations with lawmakers and the police.

This opening of the White House policy cookie jar to strengthen and enrich the far left has been a hallmark of this administration. Obamacare was written to create a guaranteed client stream for Planned Parenthood. Fracking was at first opposed by the White House for the same reason as the Keystone Pipeline, as a sop to radical environmentalists. The US coal industry has been damaged for the same reason.

That Obama would set out to damage a very fragile immigration system simply to benefit a handful of very rich, very influential, very left wing anti-American groups and donors is hardly surprising. It is how he has governed for six years.