Transcript
David Remnick (0:01)
From one World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
Taylor Mac (0:04)
A co production of the New Yorker and WNYC studios.
David Remnick (0:09)
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. President Trump, we all know, sees immigration as one of his winning issues. He's more than willing to make extreme threats, like closing the border entirely if it makes him look tough. One reason the issue works so well for him is that the Democrats tend to avoid it entirely. There really isn't a coherent view of immigration in the Democrats party, and most candidates in the race now barely bring it up, except to object to what Trump does. But at least one Democratic candidate is eager to talk about immigration. Julian Castro served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, but he also is former mayor of San Antonio in Texas, right near the border, and he wants to change the terms of the presidential debate entirely. Castro has suggested that entering the United States without papers should no longer be a federal crime. I spoke to Julian Castro last week, and I asked him why he thought focusing on immigration policy was precisely the way to beat Donald Trump.
Julian Castro (1:14)
There are different reasons that I've chosen to focus early on and rolled out as my first policy plan on immigration. Number one, that's close to my heart. My family story is an American, an immigrant's American dream story. I grew up with a grandmother that had come over from Mexico when she was 7. She worked as a maid, a cook, and a babysitter. Raised my mom as a single parent. My mom became the first one to graduate from high school, go on to college. My brother Joaquin and I were able to go to college, to law school, to become the first in our family to become professionals as lawyers.
David Remnick (1:51)
And you're the son of real activists.
Julian Castro (1:53)
Of political activists, yeah. So my mother and father were involved, mostly my mom, but my dad for a little while involved in the old Chicano movement, the Mexican American civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. My mother was a hellraiser when she was young. She had started off in the Young Democrats and then part of the Rasul NIDA party. That was a third party that at the time said that neither the Democrats nor Republicans are really sufficiently serving the needs of the Mexican American community in Texas and the Southwest. So they formed their own party. By the time my brother and I were growing up, her activism was sort of tamping down. But we still grew up being taken to rallies and speeches and different organizational meetings. So we grew up around this sense that participating in the democratic process was a good thing.