Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke on Thursday tap-danced around the number-one issue identified by voters — immigration.

With a national audience on CNN all to himself — Republican incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz declined to participate — the Democratic congressman made statements ranging from misleading to implausible to verifiably false.

O’Rourke (pictured above) has become a star of the Left, making young progressives swoon at the possibility of knocking off Cruz — and in red Texas, no less.

During the third quarter, O’Rourke raised more money than any Senate candidate ever has. That means O’Rourke won’t be cheated on resources in the final days leading to the November 6 election.

But O’Rourke is way to the Left of Texans on a number of issues. And immigration is no exception. Here is a look at how he handled questions at the CNN town hall in McAllen:

The dodge. CNN moderator Dana Bash asked O’Rourke his plan for deterring illegal immigration, prompting him to launch into a monologue about asylum.

Bash pointed out that O’Rourke had not answered the question. Aside from asylum, Bash asked, what would O’Rourke do to stop illegal immigration — which she characterized as “a real problem.”

O’Rourke’s answer essentially was to end illegal immigration by making it legal. He rejected the idea of “fences and walls” and did not mention a single measure that would deter people from evading the law. He said nothing about enforcement other than offering general support of Border Patrol officers.

“One, let’s make sure that we expand the capacity in our different visa categories,” he said. “When we ask somebody to get to the back of the line right now, we may not realize that that line stretches 18, 20, 22 years.”

The very fact that foreigners must wait so long to enter the United States legally is why so many people believe it is unfair to reward illegal immigrants who skipped the line.

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The logic of preventing illegal immigration by making it legal is akin to solving the problem of tax evasion by making it optional to pay taxes.

Among the legal immigration programs that O’Rourke wants to expand, he specifically mentioned the H-1B visa, which allows businesses to sponsor foreigners to work temporarily in high-skill jobs. O’Rourke lamented that the United States caps the visas at 85,000 per year.

“We’re not able to fill all of those high-skill, high-wage jobs here in this country with people here,” he said. “Sometimes we need to attract those from other countries to be able to do that work.”

It was an odd choice for O’Rourke. The H-1B may be the country’s most unpopular immigration program. Disney and other companies in recent years have used the program to import foreign workers to be trained by American workers, who then have lost their own jobs.

Research has shown that there are nearly twice as many people with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees in the United States as there are STEM jobs. Other research has found that H-1B workers earn less money than comparably situated American workers, suggesting that it is used mainly as a tool to depress wages for U.S. citizens.

And because employers control the H-1B visas, making it harder for visa holders to jump to other companies, critics on the Left have compared it to indentured servitude.

The obfuscation. O’Rourke cast the massive spike in immigration from Central America as the result of persecution.

“People who are fleeing the deadliest countries on the planet today — Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador — who are doing what any human being, what Amy and I would do in the same situation if it were the only way to save Ulysses and Molly and Henry’s life,” he said.

The congressman suggested that President Donald Trump is violating U.S. law to try to keep them out.

“First, let’s make sure that our laws reflect our values and that we follow the laws that we have on the books right now,” he said. “I would argue that the Trump administration has broken this country’s very own asylum laws.”

O’Rourke did not mention that under international law, people fleeing persecution are supposed to apply for asylum in the nearest safe country. Yet, Central Americans, by the tens of thousands, are walking unimpeded through Mexico to the United States.

He also did not mention that asylum is designed for people specifically targeted because of their race, gender, religious beliefs, political affiliation or ethnicity. Generalized violence traditionally has not been grounds to seek asylum, which helps explain why the vast majority of asylum claims fail in immigration court.

There has been a tenfold increase since 2013 in the share of illegal immigrants’ claiming persecution in their home countries. Many immigration experts contend that is the result of exploiting loopholes in U.S. law, not changes on the ground in Central America. During the huge spike in asylum seekers from those countries over the past decade, for example, the murder rates have remained steady.

What’s more, a survey conducted in February indicated that 83 percent of Hondurans who had a friend or relative leave the country in the previous four years were motivated by a desire for better job opportunities — not violence.

The deception. O’Rourke lit into the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, which directed criminal charges against people who entered the country unlawfully.

“In real terms, that means kids taken from their parents,” he said.

O’Rourke recounted meeting a 27-year-old woman who described bringing her seven-year-old daughter to safety. But “unbeknownst to them, they would be separated within hours,” the congressman said.

Then O’Rourke implausibly credited people in the audience for ending the policy.

“Because of the people of this community, of McAllen and the people of the border and the people of Texas, we got this administration — at least temporarily — to desist in this policy of taking kids away from their parents,” he said.

The falsehood. Much of what O’Rourke said Thursday about immigration was dubious or lacking context. On illegal border crossing statistics, however, he was just plain flat wrong.

O’Rourke spoke in opposition to a 2,000-mile-long border wall. That, in itself, is a straw man. The Trump administration is not proposing a wall covering the entire length of the border, only portions that both have high numbers of border crossers and lack physical barriers, such as mountains and rivers.

Related: Cruz Rips O’Rourke’s Plan for Socialized Medicine: ‘Doesn’t Even Pass Elementary School Math’

But it was O’Rourke’s cherry-picked immigration statistic that simply is false.

“The level of northbound apprehensions today is the lowest that it’s been since 1971, the year before our birth,” he said.

That would have been accurate a year ago. Border crossings plummeted dramatically immediately after Trump took office but began climbing again after smugglers and people wanting to come to the United States realized that no policy changes accompanied the president’s tough rhetoric.

Because of the initial dip, arrests by Border Patrol officers and authorities at the border crossing stations totaled 415,198 in fiscal year 2017 — a generational low. But the rising numbers that began last year have continued this year. Eleven months into the fiscal year 2018, apprehensions totaled 469,192.

Although September numbers have not been released, it is all but certain the total exceeded 500,000 for the fiscal year.