Senator Marco Rubio may have a toned down version of the DREAM Act he hopes to sell to both his own party and Latino voters, but he is not holding back when it comes to talking about the plight of undocumented immigrants. Even if his party doesn’t have a solution for undocumented immigrants, he said, the least they can do is not paint them as evil-doers.

“It does matter how you talk about the issue,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told CNN’s Candy Crowley in an interview that aired Sunday morning, before launching into a speech about migrant workers in Florida. “It starts by recognizing that the vast majority of people who are in this country illegally didn’t come here to steal from the American government.”

As a Cuban-American and rising star in the GOP, the freshman senator has taken on — or had foisted upon him — the role of liaison between the Republican Party and the Hispanic community. With polls showing Hispanic voters backing President Obama 67 percent to 27 percent, that’s a tough needle to thread. While Congressional Republicans have forcefully blocked a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, Rubio has a compromise: Even without a policy solution, you can still talk about them compassionately. The problem, according to Rubio, is in the messaging.

Without explicitly calling out his own party, Rubio was clear that at the very least, politicians should speak more compassionately about immigration. “You have to have immigration laws and they have to be enforced,” Rubio said. “That doesn’t mean that because you support the laws that you don’t recognize the humanitarian aspects of the immigration problem.”

Read the full story at Talking Points Memo