Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father offers perhaps a glimpse into why the candidate has never even rhetorically thrown a bone to the enforcement-only crowd on the issue of illegal immigration, or offered a bit of his usual empathy. The candidate describes moving to New York City, finding the apartment he was supposed to move into locked and unoccupied, and sleeping in an alleyway his first night in the city. He then calls the one person he knows in the Big Apple:

He greeted me on the street, a short, well-built Pakistani who had come to New York from London two years earlier and found his caustic wit and unabashed desire to make money perfectly pitched to the city’s mood. He had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York’s high-turnover, illegal immigrant workforce, waiting on tables. As we entered the apartment I saw a woman in her underwear sitting at the kitchen table, a mirror and a razor blade pushed off to one side.

Obama also notes that “he would offer me lodging again when I gave up the apartment on 109th for lack of heat, and accompany me to Housing Court when it turned out that the sublessors of my second apartment hd failed to pay the rent and had run off with my deposit.”

When Sadik, an illegal immigrant, opened his home to Obama when the had no one else to turn to, did he guarantee that Obama would never be able to bring himself to drive someone else out of their home for residing there illegally?