Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson shared his desire to secure the borders and to implement a guest worker program before a group of Latino leaders on Wednesday.
The retired brain surgeon spoke for about 15 minutes at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) annual conference, the nation’s largest gathering of Latino policy-makers. Carson was the only Republican leader to accept the invitation to speak at the Las Vegas event.
“The next president of the United States will be elected by the Latino community,” said Arturo Vargas, the group’s executive director.
“We are excited to have Dr. Ben Carson join us as one of the leading candidates for the White House in 2016 and look forward to hearing him engage the nation’s largest gathering of Latino policy-makers on the issues most important to the Latino community today,” Vargas said.
Carson said the U.S. is an attractive destination for people hoping to improve their lives, but security should still be a priority.
“As a compassionate nation we should ask what can we do to help people in nations that feel they don’t have an opportunity in their nation,” he said.
Implementing a guest worker program for the 11 million undocumented immigrants should be our next step to immigration before encouraging them to apply for full citizenship, he said, and sealing the border is more of a security plan than an immigration plan.
“We need to be looking at ways that we can share the wealth and still maintain our borders and integrity,” Carson said.
Immigration has been a tricky issue for many GOP candidates to navigate. Already, Jeb Bush has been put on the defensive by conservatives who think his pro-reform stance is too lenient.
In 2012, eventual nominee Mitt Romney ran hard to the right on the issue in the primary — calling for immigrants here illegally to “self-deport” — but lost the general election badly, receiving a far lower percentage of Hispanic voters than his predecessors George W. Bush and John McCain.