Washington - The 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States don't vote, but they have children, siblings or cousins that do, and Hillary Clinton is courting their support.
The Democratic presidential candidate has singled out immigration as a key campaign issue in her bid for the White House in 2016.
She is looking to set herself apart from her Republican rivals on the matter, and has even said she wants to go further than President Barack Obama to secure legal status, and citizenship, for millions of undocumented immigrants, most of which are Hispanic.
The move is a strategic one: securing the Hispanic vote could be what Clinton -- or any candidate -- needs to become president in the next election.
In 2012, the Hispanics made up 10 percent of the vote, compared to only two percent in 1976.
In recent elections, they have shown an increasing preference for the Democratic Party. Obama won the 2012 race with 82 percent of the minority vote, including 71% of the Hispanic vote.
Sitting with a group of undocumented students this week in Nevada, Clinton made her stance clear, calling on Congress to adopt comprehensive immigration reform and create a path to citizenship for the youths and millions of others like them.
She promised to do more than Obama, who used executive action last November to bypass Congress and approve measures to protect about four million undocumented foreigners from deportation. Clinton said she was ready to use executive action to shield many more.
Republicans immediately zeroed in on this to attack Clinton as a hyper-partisan Democrat.
"She is running even further to the left than Barack Obama," Whit Ayres, Republican pollster and adviser to conservative presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, told AFP.
"Executive actions on immigration are exactly the wrong way to solve a broken immigration system. If anything we need more bipartisan approaches to addressing a broken system, not declarations of unilateral action," said Ayres.
AFP
