Just when I was giving credit to Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro for having the guts to admit he’s in favor of erasing America’s borders, he got cold feet. As of today, he has reverted back to his party’s pretext that “no one has called for open borders.”
At the first primary debate of the campaign on Wednesday, Castro pressed every one of his rivals to pledge that as president, they would nullify the law that makes it illegal to cross in to the U.S. without authorization. But less than 24 hours later, he lost his nerve. In an interview Thursday on CNN, he walked it back and did what Democrats always do when asked about our borders, which is to spew a bunch of nonsense and claim that we already have plenty of border security.
“I’m for decriminalizing, not legalizing,” he said. (“Mom, it’s not that I failed the test, I just didn’t pass!). Castro added that there would still be “civil penalties” and a “process” but he described neither.
And then he really got lame.
“Also, open borders is a right-wing talking point,” said Castro, who up until Thursday was very proud to be for open borders. “We have 654 miles of fencing. We have thousands of border personnel. We have planes. We have helicopters. We have boats. We have guns. We have security cameras. Nobody has called for open borders.”
Castro and every other Democrat knows that the current crisis at the border, the crisis that Democrats spent the last four months denying, has nothing to do with how many guns or boats we have. It doesn’t even matter how many miles of wall or fencing we have. The hundreds of thousands of migrants throwing themselves into the care of the U.S. is made possible solely by our own asylum laws that allow it. What Castro wants to do is remove even the pretense that there should be an orderly system for entering the U.S., as opposed to inviting everyone to swim across to the Texas shore.
Castro believes that this country belongs to everyone else as much as it belongs to actual American citizens. That is the definition of open borders. He knows it, but he’s too timid to own it.
