On Tuesday, we asked you to submit questions for Rand Paul. During his visit to the editorial board, he picked one of your questions from a hat to answer on camera. Watch his response below:

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Transcript

Rand Paul: And the first question is …

Phoebe Lett, Editorial Assistant, The New York Times: From mrkinpdx, “What is your policy with respect to undocumented immigrants currently in the country? If elected president, would you deport the parents of U.S. citizen children?”

Mr. Paul: You know, I think the first thing you have to do is decide what we’re going to do with the border itself. It’s kind of like the national debt in a way. We can say ‘Oh, we want to get rid of the $19 trillion dollar debt,’ but the first thing we have to do is quit adding to the debt. So the first thing you have to do with immigration is you have to secure your border and say, ‘We’re not going to add new illegal folks that come across the border.’

The reason that’s important is if there’s going to be any leniency for those who are already here — the 11, 12 million that are already here — you can’t announce leniency with an open border. Because if you announce leniency with an open border, more will come. So I think you have to secure your border first.

It’s also important that this be done by legislation, not by executive edict. This is going on with the president repeatedly. The president believes that he can legislate or write his own laws. That’s not the way our founding fathers envisioned it. Our republic was set up that Congress would write the laws and the president would execute them.

So any form of immigration reform needs to be border security first, and we need to have the law passed by Congress, not done by the president.

You can also watch John Kasich, Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump answer reader questions.