I sat down with Bennet on Tuesday to discuss racism in the Trump era, immigration, whether Democrats caved in the government shutdown, and Bennet’s co-sponsorship of a bill that would weaken Obama-era financial regulations. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Adam Serwer: On Meet the Press, you said that “I was raised not to call people racist on the theory that it was hard for them to be rehabilitated once you said that. But there’s no question what he said was racist.” What’s the distinction and why is it important?

Michael Bennet: When you can avoid asserting that people are irredeemable then you try to avoid that. Particularly when that person is the president of the United States, which makes the racist comments that he made even more egregious and unfortunate than they would be if someone else made them.

Serwer: Do you think the Trump administration’s immigration policies are driven by racism?

Bennet: I think they’re driven by a profound anti-immigrant sentiment and a complete misapprehension of the contribution that immigrants and immigration has made to the United States of America. They see it as a negative force, immigration and immigrants as a negative force. I think the history is that it has been a positive force.

Serwer: You’ve spoken of your mother and grandparents being Holocaust survivors. How does that shape your views on immigration?

Bennet: It shapes my views on immigration in two ways. One is the sense that the United States at important moments in our history has been a refuge to people who are fleeing death and destruction in their countries.

The second is, there is not an immigrant in Colorado—and I have been to every corner of my state and over again—that has a thicker accent than my grandparents had when they died. And there is nobody I have ever met, and I don’t say this as a politician, I say it as a human, as an American citizen, there was nobody I ever met who were greater patriots than my grandparents. They loved this country. And they were astonished by our political system, by our commitment to pluralism, by their ability to rebuild their shattered lives in the United States, and they truly believe they could never have done it anywhere else. I think a lot about them when we’re having these immigration conversations. Not just about my grandparents, but my mother as well, who was the only person in the family who spoke English when they got here, who enrolled herself in public school in New York City.

Sometimes I hear people say on the floor say, my grandmother wouldn’t believe that I had been elected to the Senate. And my grandmother wouldn’t have any difficulty believing that, not because of me, but in her mind that’s the way the country worked. And I believe that tendency, that impulse in America, is one we should be cherishing, and it’s one the president of the United States doesn’t seem to grasp.