On Saturday, Nevada will hold the first of its two presidential caucuses. When campaigning here, candidates would be wise to remember that this state, with its Spanish speakers and immigrant labor, its majority-minority youth and growing Latino communities, looks a whole lot like a future version of America.

The Nevadans I know want a candidate who welcomes these changes, someone who can build on President Barack Obama's strong immigration efforts. For Nevadans, demographics go deeper than documentation, and as America becomes more diverse we ask that the next president work to help all Latino families.

Clearly, Republican candidates want to roll back immigration reform, build a wall and the front-runners want to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. But a Democratic hopeful, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has his own mixed record on the issue. In favoring American laborers over their immigrant counterparts, and in focusing solely on economics, Sanders has at times defied progressives, earning praise from those on the right whose policies have made things harder for immigrants instead.



Take ultra-conservative Rep. Steve King, who famously called border-crossers drug mules with "calves the size of cantaloupes." King once admitted, "Bernie has taken some positions that I agree with. And part of his immigration policy is something that I agree with."

King's comments are not unfounded. Back in 2007, then-Rep. Sanders stood with conservatives in rejecting an immigration overhaul bill, using language that "was starkly economic about guest-worker visas, which were viewed skeptically by organized labor," as The New York Times described, but now Sen. Sanders justifies his vote solely along human rights lines. Facts matter.

In a speech on the Senate floor about the vote, Sanders said the bill was about "bringing into this country over a period of years millions of low-wage temporary workers with the result that wages and benefits in this country, which are already going down, will go down even further." This is a Republican talking point that has been used to oppose comprehensive immigration reform.

Following that "no" vote, major immigration legislation sat on a shelf until 2013, at which point Sanders finally joined most Democrats in voting "yes." His earlier resistance may have struck constituents as righteous, but any progress is better than no progress, and those six years of inaction had countless immigrants living in fear of deportation.

