Presidential candidates forming their immigration policies

How should the U.S. prevent immigrants from entering the country illegally?

Should children born in the United States of unauthorized immigrant parents be considered U.S. citizens?

What should become of the more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States? Should they be allowed to earn legal status or citizenship, or should they be sent back to their home countries?

These are among the questions on immigration policy that presidential candidates of both political parties have been addressing throughout the campaign, and their positions are beginning to crystallize.

The differences are both stark and subtle, particularly among Republicans.

The Democratic candidates largely see eye-to-eye on immigration policy. All three would allow unauthorized immigrants to remain in the country and work their way through a process to be granted citizenship, and all would maintain the protections put in place by President Barack Obama's administration to prevent the deportation of hundreds of thousands of children who were born in the United States but whose parents came here illegally and of parents of U.S. citizens.

With only a few exceptions, most Republican candidates support building a fence along the Mexican border, although Donald Trump thus far has been the only one to suggest he can get Mexico to pay for the wall's construction.

Many Republicans support requiring businesses use a monitoring system that provides employers the residency status of job applicants.

And almost exclusively Republican candidates say if elected president, they will repeal the Obama administration's protections.

Differences in GOP

But Republicans do go their separate ways on some elements of immigration policy.

Republican candidates must navigate a political landscape in which many in their party's base want restrictive immigration policy and a general electorate that is more open to allowing unauthorized immigrants to stay and become citizens.

For example, only 37 percent of Republicans think unauthorized immigrants should be allowed to remain in the country and apply for citizenship, according to Pew Research Center. That figure is 48 percent among independents.

Some Republican candidates have embraced a pathway to citizenship, including Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon and leader in the most recent polls on the race in Iowa.

'They have to pay back taxes, they have to pay taxes going forward, and they have to maintain pristine citizenship. That would allow them to be guest workers,” Carson told the Wall Street Journal in September. 'In terms of them becoming American citizens, they don't get any special privileges, they don't get to cut the line, they don't get an expedited process. And we get to determine the criteria in which we would allow that to happen.”

Marco Rubio is the only other GOP candidate who has fared well in the polls and supported a pathway to citizenship.

Rubio, as with most Republican candidates, has emphasized securing the border and largely avoided the citizenship discussion on the campaign trail. The U.S. senator from Florida was a member of the bipartisan team of eight senators who in 2013 crafted a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included a pathway to citizenship.

The bill passed the Senate when it was controlled by Democrats and was never considered by the Republican-controlled House.

Rubio's immigration plan calls for securing the border; requiring employers use E-Verify, which verifies immigrants' legal status; moving away from family-based legal immigration to merit-based for immigrants with job skills; and addressing those living in the United States illegally.

Rubio's plan would require unauthorized immigrants seeking citizenship to apply for a temporary visa, submit to a background check and pay fines, then after 10 years apply for residency.

'And after we've done those two things (securing the border and transitioning to merit-based immigration), I believe the American people will be very reasonable and responsible about what you do with someone who's been here and isn't a criminal,” Rubio said in the Sept. 16 Republican debate.

Pathway to citizenship

Trump, who led the polls for much of the summer, opposes a pathway to citizenship. So do many of the candidates who have been in the second tier of polling on the Republican race in Iowa - Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina.

Even more GOP candidates support allowing unauthorized immigrants to remain in the country and earn legal status, but not citizenship. Such a distinction would allow unauthorized immigrants to remain in the U.S. without fear of deportation, but they would not be granted the right to vote or be eligible for government assistance.

Only two candidates - Trump and Rick Santorum - oppose both a pathway to citizenship and legal status for unauthorized immigrants.

'We either have a country, or we don't have a country. We are a country of laws,” Trump said during last week's Republican debate in Milwaukee. He said unauthorized immigrants are 'going to have to go out and they will come back, but they are going to have to go out, and hopefully they get back (legally).”

After Obama's decisive re-election in 2012, the Republican National Committee commissioned a report to examine the party's shortcomings in recent presidential elections, having lost the popular vote in five of the past six.

A key section of the report, titled the 'Growth and Opportunity Project,” addressed the fact 2012 nominee Mitt Romney garnered only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. The report suggested Republican candidates' immigration policies and rhetoric turned off those voters.

'If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (that is, self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence,” the report said. 'It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

With the next presidential election in full gear, advocates for immigrants in Iowa do not think Republican candidates are heeding the GOP report's warnings.

The Hispanic vote

In fact, Republican candidates have gone in the opposite direction, said Matt Hildreth, director of Iowa's Voice, a state chapter of the national immigrant advocacy group America's Voice.

'There's just something about the caucus and primary process that I think makes the Republican Party prioritize the short-term and base voter mobilization over long-term party strategy,” Hildreth said.

Hildreth said even though some Republican candidates embrace a pathway to citizenship, the fact most have said they would end the protections granted by the Obama administration puts them at odds with many Hispanic voters.

Hildreth said many immigrant families are a mixture of legal and unauthorized residents, so any repeal of current protections threatens to divide families.

'At that point, that just sort of defines a candidate for the immigrant and Latino communities,” Hildreth said.

Many in the immigrant community think Republican candidates are following the lead of Trump, who when announcing his candidacy infamously accused Mexico of sending to the U.S. mostly criminals.

Monica Reyes, co-founder of DREAM Iowa, which advocates on behalf of children born in the United States of unauthorized immigrants, said Republican candidates had an opportunity to reach out to Latinos after the 2012 election.

'But instead they chose to follow in Donald Trump's footsteps,” said Reyes, who has earned legal status. 'And they have caused even more damage to their relationship with the Latino community.”

Meanwhile, a 2-to-1 ruling on Nov. 9 from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans upheld a Texas court's injunction against President Obama's executive actions, which the president proposed a year ago as a way to provide deportation relief to up to 5 million undocumented immigrants.

The administration announced the next day it would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. But time is running out for further legal action that could revive the president's programs while he still is in office.

'I don't want my children to fear I will be taken from them one day, and I don't want millions of other decent people to continue suffering such humiliation,” said Miguel Claros, a 51-year-old garage mechanic from Bolivia who lives in Silver Spring with his partner, Fatima Quisbert, and their two U.S.-born sons.

Claros and Quisbert are both undocumented immigrants from Bolivia.

'I am filled with sadness and rage,” Claros said.

Reuters contributed to this story.