Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently sat down with Ezra Klein of the progressive website Vox and discussed his various positions. While most of his answers read like they came straight from the Communist Manifesto, Sanders shocked Klein by revealing he is a restrictionist on immigration.

Klein asked Sanders if they could solve international poverty by radically increasing immigration to the levels of open borders.

The senator rebuked him, saying that the only people who favor open borders are the rich people who can abuse them by reducing their wages.

"Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal," Sanders said.

The interviewer was taken aback from his departure from modern liberal orthodoxy. Klein insisted it would help relieve global poverty.

The Vermont senator's position is that of a traditional progressive who believes it is primarily the responsibility of liberals to care about raising the wages of Americans. Progressive Philip Cafaro made this case in his book How Many is Too Many.

"It would make everybody in America poorer —you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that," Sanders said. "If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or the UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people."

"What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them," he continued. "I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs."

Sanders made the case that mass immigration caused high unemployment among the youth and minorities.

"You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?" the presidential candidate said.

"I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer," Sanders said.

The senator realized, unlike many of his colleagues including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), that his obligation is to the people who elected him.

"I do weigh it. As a United States senator in Vermont, my first obligation is to make certain kids in my state and kids all over this country have the ability to go to college, which is why I am supporting tuition-free public colleges and universities," Sanders said. "I believe we should create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes."

Despite the claims in the media, Sanders' position is mainstream among voters.

The Center for Immigration Studies presented polls by Gallup, Pew Research, CBS News/ New York Times Poll, and Fox News Poll all of which stated that more Americans want to reduce legal immigration than increase it.

Sanders has held this populist position for a long time, he even opposed the McCain/Kennedy amnesty plan in 2007.

His position on immigration is pure progressive populism, something that many on the left including former Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas) used to advocate, protecting American workers and interests first.

Watch Sanders speak about immigration at the 5:50 mark: