Political Views on Immigration Reform

Donald Trump knocked former Florida governor Jeb Bush, calling him "weak on immigration." Trump specifically mentioned a view Bush espoused in a 2014 Fox News interview that immigrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border as an "act of love." "We need strong borders. We need a wall," Trump said, addressing his solutions to the immigration issue. "The king of building buildings, the king of building walls--none of them can build them like Donald Trump."

Ben Carson has not directly said if he supports a pathway to citizenship, but in his book America The Beautiful, Carson seemed to imply that a pathway to citizenship is the "moral" thing to do. "Is it moral for us, for example, to take advantage of cheap labor from illegal immigrants while denying them citizenship? I'm sure you can tell from the way I phrased the question that I believe we have taken the moral low road on this issue," he wrote. Carson has also said the United States should model its immigration reform after Canada's guest-worker program. "People already here illegally could apply for guest-worker status from outside of the country," Carson wrote in November. "This means they would have to leave first."

Hillary Clinton Hillary Rodham Clinton took a stand on immigration policy when she sat down with a group of students in Las Vegas on Tuesday. She aligned herself with President Obama’s controversial executive actions on immigration. She signaled that she would go beyond to “fight for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship.” She suggested that Republican candidates who are proposing anything short of a “full and equal” path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants are talking about “second-class status.”

Bernie Sanders believes America's current immigration system is broken and requires comprehensive reform. An important aspect of immigration reform, according to Bernie, is to establish some pathway to legal residency or citizenship for the 11 million undocumented workers living in the United States so that they need not work and live in the shadows.