The young Democratic mayor and Texas native offers his vision for the future of education and immigration and predicts that his ardently red state will soon turn blue. Excerpt from “Julian Castro, Mayor of San Antonio TX,” January 7, 2013.

JULIAN CASTRO, Mayor of San Antonio, TX

I’m convinced that in this 21st-century global economy, brainpower is the new currency of success, that human capital is the most important investment, the most important asset of any community. So after I got elected in 2009, we went to work on something called SA2020, a visioning effort that kicked off on Saturday, September 25, 2010, with a very simple question: What kind of city do we want to be on Friday, September 25, 2020? And most important was the issue of education.

San Antonio for many years has faced a dropout rate that is higher than the national average and higher than the Texas average; at least a third of the population there doesn’t graduate from high school. Even as the economy has done very well – San Antonio has been judged one of the [nation’s] most recession-resistant cities – still many people don’t make it through the most basic hurdle of education.

This November we did something that had never been done in San Antonio history. San Antonians voted to tax themselves – that’s right, I said tax themselves – one eighth of a cent for the purpose of investing in high-quality, full-day pre-K for four-year-olds in our city over the next eight years.

We need to ensure that folks never get behind in the first place. We need to ensure that from the very beginning of a young child’s life that he or she has the opportunity to succeed because he or she is getting educated well.

For generations our United States of America has been built up with the philosophy that nobody is guaranteed success in life, but everybody ought to be guaranteed a chance to succeed.

Question and answer session with Rose Guilbault, past president, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors

GUILBAULT: How would you describe the DREAM Act [Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors], and what is your position on it and its role in the immigration issue? 

CASTRO: My hope is that Congress will pass the DREAM Act. As you all know, there are different variants to it, but hopefully the DREAM Act will be passed. I’m convinced that the place we need to start with “Dreamers” is [to acknowledge] that they’re morally blameless. [If you’re a child] you’re not choosing where you’re going to go with your parents; it’s not your fault that your parents brought you to the United States. And for a lot of these young people, this is the only country that they’ve ever known as home. Many of them are very sharp. In San Antonio we had two examples of folks who were valedictorians in their high school classes who were “Dreamers.” One of them went to Harvard.

With regard to comprehensive immigration reform [I support a plan under which] there will be a path to citizenship if folks pay a fine that acknowledges that they did come in here undocumented, illegally – whatever phrase you want to use – that they learn English; and that they get to the back of the line – because you don’t want people cutting folks in line who have been legally in the process for a while. The legal immigration system is so broken down and the wait is so long that that’s part of what encourages folks who are on the other side of the border to try and take their chances and come here illegally. You have to respect when folks try and do things by the book the way that they should.

And [the government must] also find a way to ensure that when an employer hires someone, they are hiring somebody who is in the country legally. I think those are the important elements to comprehensive immigration reform.

GUILBAULT: Do you think what you’ve done [with preschool education] can be a national model?

CASTRO: I hope it is. I hope that it’s at least a model for the state. Pre-K for SA was an effort of educators and the business community in San Antonio to provide 22,400 four-year-olds with full-day pre-K over the next eight years. It accomplishes that in two ways: by establishing four model centers of pre-K excellence around our city that each educate 500 students, and also by taking a certain amount of dollars and funding public schools, charter schools and private schools that can leverage public funding to increase the number of seats they have in their own existing programs around the city.

It significantly expands pre-K. It does it by paying teachers more – their starting salary is going to be $60,000, which for Texas is significant. It has a longer school day that ends at 5:30. It will have robust teacher training for teachers from pre-K all the way to third grade, so that we enhance the level of teaching not just in [model center] classrooms, but throughout San Antonio classrooms, and we maintain the gains that we make in pre-K.

 But more than anything else, what I hope becomes a model for Texas is that Texas is willing to make the investment in pre-K – because right now it only funds half a day’s worth of pre-K for students, and it only funds [that] half a day if you make less than 185 percent of poverty level, which for a family of four is about $42,500, [or if you meet certain] other requirements.

GUILBAULT: Those of us in San Francisco probably view Texas as very conservative. Do you feel supported in Texas?

CASTRO: Yes. Texas used to be a Democratic state for a long time. Ann Richards was the last [Democratic] governor who was elected, in 1990. There’s a new Texas. Demographic changes are moderating Texas significantly. Also, Texas has done relatively well during this downturn. So we’ve had people move in from other places that are more moderate.

I recognize that we [still] have a very red state there – 29 statewide offices with zero Democrats in office. But places like Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas are already going Democratic, and soon I think more of the suburbs will; it will take longer for some of the rural areas, but it’s changing.

Fortunately for Texas, I think that the state is going to turn blue in six to eight years. Partly because of the [partisan] ideology and refusal to compromise, [Republicans] are losing the business community little by little – they’re not making the investments in roads, in water, in education, in those things that are so important to being economically competitive in the 21st-century economy.

GUILBAULT: How do you think Latino voters are going to influence the future of the United States? What do you think is the most pressing issue for the Latino community today?

CASTRO: Education. Even though immigration reform has received the lion’s share of attention, the fact is that the dropout rate in the Latino community is higher than in just about any community, that the fundamental ability of people to enjoy the fruits of America, to pursue their American dreams, is being hampered because too many of them are going to public schools that are decrepit, that aren’t high quality. Their dreams are stunted, and oftentimes they don’t have the chance that they should have.

The Latino community is a very diverse community: people who are of Mexican heritage,  Guatemalan, Cuban, Honduran. [The Latino community] is tied together by the Spanish language historically, but it encompasses different views, different life experiences.

San Antonio has a huge Latino population, very proudly American. It’s a community of faith and it’s a community with a hard work ethic. All of those things, those are the values that have helped make our country great in the first place, and the growth of the Latino community is going to be a replenishment of the values that have always made the United States great.