People are people

[George Hawrysch]

Люди есть люди
The sense here is "people are, after all, people" i.e. expect
from some specific subset of them at least something of what
you would expect from all of them in general. Like a number
of other tautologies ("a rose is a rose"), it implies that
what matters in the given instance are the commonalities
rather than the differences, or that any differences
are relatively unimportant in themselves.

люди как люди
This means "people like any other [people]" (cf. Baranskaya's
novella "Неделя как неделя"). It connotes shared tendencies,
traits, even a degree of uniformity. The expression doesn't
suggest that (any given) people are ordinary -- though they
may also be that -- as much as it implies they are the same.

George Hawrysch

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