In a tight race, Sen. Ted Cruz’s desperate fear-mongering is true to form.

In a tight race, the senator’s desperate fear-mongering is true to form.

It’s understandable that President Donald Trump would have a hard time relating to the pitiful gaggle of Central American asylum-seekers inching ever so desperately toward the United States.

The so-called caravan of men, women and children, numbered at a few thousand, is still hundreds of miles from our southern border. Yet, Trump is mulling sending 15,000 troops to form a human wall to ward off the “invasion.” He’s also boasting of a plan to end birthright citizenship, a right enshrined by the U.S. Constitution.

This fear-mongering may shock the conscience of Americans who still believe in a moral or religious duty to help refugees, but it’s what we’ve come to expect from a man raised in a cocoon of luxury.

We would expect a little more from a man whose immigrant father fled a brutal dictatorship and arrived in America with $100 sewn into his underwear. Yet, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has jumped on the caravan bandwagon with a zeal so great we fear he may have fallen off and injured his head.

On the campaign trail, Cruz has strained to connect his Democratic opponent to the caravan, bizarrely claiming U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke is welcoming the migrants with “welcome baskets and foot massages.”

On Friday, Cruz falsely accused O’Rourke of allowing aides to use campaign donations to help the caravan. His proof ? A heavily edited “undercover” video from Project Veritas, a right-wing group that has been caught several times trying to smear left-leaning organizations and candidates with misleading videos.

For the record, O’Rourke says his aides took it upon themselves to use less than $300 for donations such as diapers that went to an El Paso charity helping women and children. O’Rourke’s spokesman said the donations would be reported appropriately in federal campaign filings.

You can just hear Trump’s voice: There goes lyin’ Ted.

Just recently, Cruz was playing up his Hispanic credentials in the Rio Grande Valley, even pointing out the diversity he brings to a Senate chamber of mostly white men. It’s true, but how rich is Cruz’s perspective if he can’t cobble together some compassion for immigrants fleeting a dangerous country as his father did? Cruz would point out that Rafael Cruz came legally during the Batista regime on a student via and then applied for amnesty.

The migrants at the border are trying to come here legally, too. The law allows them to request asylum.

Of course, they’ll never benefit from the special rules extended to Cubans fleeing the Castro regime, including medical care, food and an expedited path to legal residency. For 20 years, the “wet foot, dry foot” policy allowed most Cuban migrants who reached U.S. soil to stay and become legal permanent residents after a year.

Nor is the migrant caravan anywhere near the crisis of 1980’s Mariel Boatlift, which brought an influx of more than 125,000 Cubans to Florida over six months. In that case, security concerns were more than justified because Castro had allowed prisoners and mentally ill people to board boats alongside families.

Some Americans then, as now, rejected the whole lot of them. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida recalled in a 2016 candidate forum how he endured bullying as a 7-year-old: “Some of the kids, the older kids, were taunting my family: ‘Why don't you go back on your boat?’” said Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants.

With government, community and family support, many Cubans who came clinging to boats assimilated and became doctors, entrepreneurs, pillars of the community: “The vast majority of these people were honest, decent, hard-working, industrious people,” then-Miami Mayor told El Nuevo Herald in 2016.

Cruz surely understands the value of immigration. He is the product of it.As a constitutional lawyer who famously memorized the U.S. Constitution at age 13, he should be the loudest opponent to Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship. In 2011, Cruz said the party was wrong to attack a right enshrined in the Constitution. In 2015, he flip-flopped. In 2018, Cruz says he needs to study the issue.

We know that Cruz — if he wanted — could be a leader in calming fears about a rag-tag group of asylum seekers that poses no security threat to the most powerful nation on earth. Instead, in the final days of a heated campaign, the only thing Cruz has to offer voters is a cynical pandering to our worst instincts. At least Trump has the excuse of a coddled childhood. Our senator’s only excuse is his desperation for political power.

After six years, we’ve come to expect that from Cruz — true to form.