Republican presidential candidate John Kasich on Sunday called for a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants in the U.S., as well as a guest worker program to meet the needs of the labor market.

“The 12 million who are here, we ought to find out who they are,” he said on CNN. “If they’ve been law-abiding over a period of time they ought to be legalized and they ought to be able to stay here. There are people who contribute a lot to the U.S.”

The comments from the Ohio governor, a late entrant into the GOP race who currently polls near the back of the pack, come as the Republican Party has had to contend in recent weeks with front-runner Donald Trump saying that many Mexican immigrants are criminals and his call for the Mexican government to fund a wall along the border.

An internal autopsy conducted by the Republican National Committee after the 2012 election concluded that to win the 2016 presidential election, the party “must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform” to attract Latino voters who have overwhelmingly flocked to the Democrats in recent elections.

On Sunday, Mr. Kasich seemed to disavow his previous support for eliminating “birthright citizenship,” the law granting automatic U.S. citizenship to almost all children born on U.S. soil. “I don’t think we need to go there,” he said Sunday.