GOP presidential hopeful Ben Carson: Close all borders

By Kyle Roerink

Wednesday, June 17, 2015 | 4:45 p.m.

GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson called to close all of the nation’s borders while speaking to a conference of more than 600 Latino elected and appointed officials from around the nation on Wednesday.

Carson’s comments highlight the diverse array of immigration reforms proposed by Democrats and Republicans on the 2016 presidential campaign trail. Carson, who’s one of the more than 20 GOP presidential hopefuls, said closing the border is a way to both control the influx of undocumented immigrants and securing the nation from terrorist groups like al-Qaida and ISIS.

“The reason I think we need to seal our borders completely ... is not so much because I am afraid of Honduras,” Carson said. “I am afraid of somebody from Syria.”

Carson also has proposed adding a guest worker program for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country. He said it would remove them “from the shadows” and would require them to pay back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. Participants would have to “wait in line” to receive citizenship, Carson said.

The nonpartisan National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, which represents more than 6,000 Latino officials nationwide, invited Carson and other presidential contenders to speak at its annual conference being held in Las Vegas this week.

Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will speak later this week at the conference.

There are few better locations for the NALEO conference.

Nevada is a bellwether state for the presidential election and one of the driving factors for its swing status is its growing Latino population. Since the state’s inception, it has chosen the candidate who wins the presidency 31 out of 38 times.

Latinos were 5 percent of the electorate in 1994 and are now 15 percent of Nevada's voting bloc. The 215,000 registered Latino voters have longstanding ties to Democrats and will likely mobilize in lockstep with the party this cycle. But Republicans do have plenty to gain. There are at least 200,000 unregistered Latino voters still up for grabs.

The GOP stance on immigration, which has alienated many Latinos from the party, will drive Democrat mobilization efforts in the state. Republicans have long called for a full-scale border closing. They also refused to vote on a comprehensive reform policy passed out of the Senate in 2013, adding to the disenchantment of many of the nation’s Latinos.

On Wednesday, Katie Packer Gage, Mitt Romney’s deputy campaign manager from the 2012 election cycle, said the party needs to make a national shift on the policy.

“I saw firsthand how the rhetoric on immigration during the GOP primary, from all of the candidates, painted our party in a negative light and came back to bite us in the general election,” she said in a media release.

Nevada’s Republican congressional delegates have done little to propose reforms. At the state level, Attorney General Adam Laxalt joined a lawsuit to repeal President Barack Obama’s executive order that gives quasi citizenship and temporary work permits.

Clinton will speak Thursday and is likely to outline her immigration proposals. She visited Las Vegas last month and supported Obama’s policies and said undocumented immigrants deserve an equal path to citizenship.