Peter: I can’t claim to have looked into the president’s eyes and seen his soul, so any assessment of mine is just an opinion subject to correction by those who might know better. But I think we can agree that the president is a man of conviction who sincerely holds his beliefs because he believes them to be right. I would submit that rules out the “pay-offs from the cheap-labor lobby” explanation that I sometimes hear. The “pander for the Hispanic vote” argument strikes me as incomplete and too craven; no doubt, the president thinks his immigration views will resonate with Hispanics and get them to vote Republican, but that would seem to be a by-product, not a cause. His frequent invocation that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande” and the references to his experience in Texas and his use of a variety of cliches has become an object of some hilarity, and rightly so, but my sense is that he really believes this stuff. I may well be wrong, but this just seems the simplest and most reasonable explanation. Do you have any other ideas?