Time, Twitter, and VHS continue to be the bane of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. As if the left needed another reminder that Biden has been in politics for decades, and that the center of the Democratic Party used to be considerably further to the right than it is today, along comes video unearthed by CNN’s KFile, in which Biden takes a practically Trumpian tone when talking about tightening U.S. immigration laws, building fences along the U.S.-Mexico border, punishing “sanctuary cities,” and jailing employers who hire “illegals.”

The clip is from 2006, which isn’t that old, but is also a lifetime in Democratic politics. Barack Obama was against gay marriage. Kirsten Gillibrand was opposed to “amnesty for illegal immigrants” (another KFile exclusive) and was calling for increased deportations. In 2007, Gillibrand would say “you have to close the borders” in order to “right size” immigration—the same year that Senator Bernie Sanders opposed comprehensive immigration reform on the basis that “millions of people” coming into the country would “drive wages down even lower than they are now” for American citizens. Gillibrand and Biden have both evolved a lot since then. (Sanders, for what it’s worth, remains somewhat more skeptical about immigration than the median Democratic presidential candidate.)

Democratic centrists probably won’t care all that much about the new Biden video. They might even agree with him. Still, it’s another tally in the non-woke column for the 76-year-old Scrantonite, who has already committed a multitude of progressive sins, from his flippant remarks about touching women to his non-apology apology to Anita Hill, to his past praise of segregationist Strom Thurmond and his opposition to desegregating busing.

The clip itself is sure to provide plenty of fodder for Biden’s progressive enemies. “Folks, I voted for a fence, I voted, unlike most Democrats—and some of you won't like it—I voted for 700 miles of fence,” he says during an appearance at a South Carolina rotary club in November 2006, defending his vote for the Secure Border Act, which allocated over a billion dollars for hundreds of miles of double-layered fence. He went on:

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“But, let me tell you, we can build a fence 40 stories high—unless you change the dynamic in Mexico and—and you will not like this, and—punish American employers who knowingly violate the law when, in fact, they hire illegals. Unless you do those two things, all the rest is window dressing.”

“Now, I know I'm not supposed to say it that bluntly, but they're the facts, they're the facts. And so everything else we do is in between here. Everything else we do is at the margins. And the reason why I add that parenthetically, why I believe the fence is needed does not have anything to do with immigration as much as drugs” ... “And let me tell you something folks, people are driving across that border with tons, tons, hear me, tons of everything from byproducts for methamphetamine to cocaine to heroin and it's all coming up through corrupt Mexico ...”

Asked for comment by CNN on Friday, Biden’s team attempted to downplay his past comments and distance their candidate from his pre–Obama era politics. “As then-Senator Biden said at the time, ‘we can build a fence 40 stories high,’ but it will not address the real issues here,” the spokesman said, adding that Biden wants to pass comprehensive immigration reform, create a pathway to citizenship, and end Trump’s “crackdown on sanctuary cities and especially its repugnant treatment of migrant children.”

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