Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders each tried to prove their commitment to immigration reform at a bilingual town hall-style forum on Thursday.
Mr. Sanders, amid criticism from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for voting against legislation in 2007 that would have overhauled the immigration system and granted millions of Latino immigrants legal status, said he opposed the bill because a guest-worker provision would have been “akin to slavery.”
Mrs. Clinton said that changing the immigration system would be “a big political issue” if she were elected and reminded the mostly Latino audience that she had been an early critic of Donald J. Trump’s offensive comments about Mexican immigrants.
She promised to remove a rule that requires immigrants who have returned to their home countries to wait three or 10 years, depending on how long they had been in the country illegally, before applying to return to the United States.
