Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, the Democratic challenger to Ted Cruz, has opened up about many a hot-button topic but one topic he hasn’t yet weighed in on is the migrant caravan currently heading toward Texas’s southern border.
According to the Daily Caller, who emailed O’Rourke’s campaign, the Democratic hopeful had no official statement to give on the migrant caravan “yet”:
“Beto does not yet have a statement about the migrant caravan. Stay tuned,” an email from the campaign stated. “In general, Beto believes that immigrants help our state and country grow strong, safe, and prosperous and wants to ensure that immigrants have a lawful, earned path to citizenship.”
This email was received by the Daily Caller last Wednesday, and O’Rourke still has yet to make a statement on it.
There’s a good reason for this. The migrant caravan is something of a boon for Republicans going into midterms, and pad their points about national security. It may even give further approval to Trump’s border wall campaign promise.
O’Rourke is on record of just stopping short of calling for an abolishment of ICE, but noting that he’s “open” to “doing away with it” in order to let another agency take over its responsibilities. He’s definitely open to birthright citizenship and the passage of the DREAM Act. With the migrant caravan currently thousands strong, O’Rourke might find himself stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Approvals toward the caravan may show him to be dangerous to Texans, and thus they’ll turn away from him. Any rejections of the caravan and he risks angering his Democratic base.
What we can glean from what O’Rourke thinks about the caravan can come from various statements he’s made. We have him on record telling reporters that much of the fears about the caravan are made up by the Trump administration, and a party trying to stoke irrational fears according to ABC News:
Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke says “there’s a lot of paranoia and fear” about a caravan of Central Americans walking toward the Mexico-U.S. border, and blamed the Trump administration for stoking those with Election Day looming.
The Democratic congressman told reporters in Austin on Wednesday, “It may not be an accident that we’re 13 days” from the Nov. 6 election. He said concerns about the caravan have come from “an administration that’s trying to make us scared of one another.”
The “fears” O’Rourke is referring to are those of criminal and terroristic elements residing within it, as well as economic fallout from so many illegal migrants entering the country without permission. Rest assured, as I’ve covered in more detail previously, it’s likely terrorists are traveling with the caravan, and we know for a fact that there are criminals by migrant members own admissions.
O’Rourke is definitely open to being far easier on illegal immigrants than many Texans would like, especially with their concerns mounting in the face of the oncoming caravan. Cruz’s campaign has taken advantage of this fact and talked about O’Rourke’s positions on immigration with the caravan as the backdrop.
All things considered, O’Rourke is likely silent on it because he loses on it no matter what.
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