“When comprehensive immigration reform was up for a vote in the Congress, Senator Sanders went on Lou Dobbs’s show—are you familiar with Lou Dobbs?—and said that immigrants take our jobs and depress our wages,” O’Malley said. “Not only are those statements flat-out wrong, they actually harm the consensus.”

In that 2007 appearance, on CNN, Sanders said, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down, even lower than they are right now.”

“And as we know, the principle industries which hire the bulk of illegal aliens—that is construction, landscaping, leisure, hospitality—those are all industries in which wages are declining,” said Dobbs, an immigration hardliner who’s now at Fox Business. “I don’t hear that discussed on the Senate floor by the proponents of this amnesty legislation.”

“That’s right,” Sanders said. “They have no good response.”