My God. Four days before an election, he went full cuck.

This clip would have been better in every way if he had described their native lands as “sh*thole countries”:

Bob Corker defending the fleeing migrants: "They're being tortured….I have a feeling that if you were living in one of these Central American countries and you had little girls and little boys you're raising you might be trying to figure out a way to come to the great US of A" pic.twitter.com/VzocuyUiOZ — Alan He (@alanhe) November 2, 2018

I assume Corker would say (and maybe did go on to say) that sympathy for the migrants’ predicament doesn’t require opening the border for them. His point is that they shouldn’t be demonized, not that they should be waved through and have green cards handed out like candy. But that’s a fine line: If conditions back home are as bad as he says, the moral — and legal — thing to do is to grant them asylum, no? And not just them. Everyone in Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador is dealing with the sort of hardships he describes. On what grounds, by his logic, should they be denied a place in the United States?

YouGov asked Americans under what circumstances the U.S. should accept asylum claims. Note the third category:

The first two categories are limited in theory although they’d apply to millions of people potentially depending upon how you broadly you define “violence” and “persecution.” War is the classic example of violence that justifies refugee claims, but the form typically cited by Central American migrants is gang violence. Presumably high violent crime of any sort, gang-related or not, might also qualify. But look again at that third category. It applies to literally everyone and yet the overall pro- and anti- positions aren’t that far from 50/50. Here’s the partisan split:

A majority of the open-borders party believes America has a “responsibility” to accept immigrants for no better reason than that they want to live where the economy is better. Last week I described Democrats’ apparent position on the caravan this way:

Many (most?) illegal immigrants who enter the U.S. could spitball some grounds for asylum if invited to do so. If they don’t face political persecution back home, they may face organized crime; if they don’t face organized crime, they may face poverty; if they don’t face poverty, they almost certainly face a harder future economically than they’d have in America. Insofar as the left’s threshold for admitting someone seems to be whether he or she is “seeking a better life in America,” whatever that might mean, there’s effectively no limiting principle to how many might enter under the heading of “asylum.”

And now we have statistical evidence that this is, in fact, their position. Economic hardship is enough. There’s no limiting principle.

Back to Corker. This, at least, is true:

Describing the caravan issue as “political football,” Corker told a story about a friend who recently texted him about a conspiracy theory in which some conservatives have alleged a “Democratic person who’s very wealthy” — presumably liberal billionaire George Soros — was funding the caravan. “I said, are you kidding me? If anybody’s funding it, it’s some Republican donor, because it has obviously turned into an election issue that has benefited the Republican side,” said Corker.

Liberals are as likely to fund a border scare right before an election as conservatives are to fund a big anti-Medicare campaign around the same time. They might want to do it; they might believe wholeheartedly in the cause; but they would know which side would benefit at the polls if they did, and it ain’t their own. The Soros/caravan theories aren’t just unsubstantiated, they’re incoherent. You can dislike the man and his politics without thinking he’s an imbecile who’d unwittingly sabotage his own party.

Here’s a little more from Corker on immigration last night. If he’s willing to go this far in bucking GOP orthodoxy, with just two months left in his political career, you’d think he might go the whole way and endorse his buddy, Democrat Phil Bredesen, for Senate. Corker so dislikes Marsha Blackburn that he sometimes can’t bring himself to say her name; in fact, he was asked just recently who he’d vote for and he did everything he could to indicate “Blackburn” — but again, without actually saying the word. What does he have to lose at this point from going full liberal? Bredesen’s far enough behind now that Corker’s endorsement probably couldn’t save him anyway.