ABC News has posted a pretty compelling interview with Mike Huckabee about immigration. In it, Huckabee was asked about charges from rivals that he's soft on immigration because he supported the children of illegal immigrants being eligible for scholarships and backed free prenatal care for illegal immigrants in need of it.

Huckabee's response:

"We penalize law-breakers. We don't penalize their children for something they can't help.

"If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he's on the hospital steps, what do the other candidates suggest we do, let him sit there and gasp until he doesn't have any air left and he dies? If a child comes to our school -- and our law, by the way, in most of our states, mine certainly says you've got to educate a child if he's of child age -- what do you, break your own law and say, `No, you can't come in the schoolhouse door'?

"No, you don't do that. What you do is you elect a president who will fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don't then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That's not what this country does. We're a better country than that."

Right, but the question is whether the GOP base, not the country as a whole, is "better" than this. That Huckabee actually has to defend such sentiments tells you pretty much all you need to know about the sway that today's nativist right holds over GOP primary politics.