Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson was the only one of the ever-growing GOP line up to speak at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) on Wednesday.

During his speech, Carson told the audience of Latino leaders that the Latino community's concerns don't just relate to immigration.

Carson was the only Republican candidate to answer NALEO's call for a speaker from that party, according to NBC News. The organization had contacted 15 confirmed or potential GOP presidential candidates. In a speech in front of 6,000 elected Latino officials and leaders from around the nation, Carson said the Latino community does not place all importance on immigration reform.

"A lot of people told me what I should talk about when I came here, they said Latino elected officials? You need to talk about immigration," Carson said Wednesday afternoon. "Well that's like when I talk to an [African American] group and they say you need to talk about government entitlements. Give me a break! People have a vast variety of things that they're interested in and to pigeonhole people into one area I think indicates something more about the person doing the pigeonholing."

Carson continued to express the Republican Party's immigration rhetoric, adding his ideas on securing the border with Mexico. However, he argued it would help in the fight against terrorism.

"The reason that I think we need to seal our borders completely, all of our borders -- north, south, east and west -- is not so much because I'm afraid of somebody from Honduras, but I'm afraid of somebody from Syria who wants to bomb us and do bad things," he said, according to the Hill.

Despite Carson's attempt to urge Latino leaders to shift away from immigration reform, the issue remains a very important one for the community.

A Pew Research poll from October last year found Latinos did place more importance on education and the economy, 92 percent and 91 percent respectively. Only 73 percent of those questioned in the poll thought immigration was the most important. However, as the November election neared the polling numbers shifted.

Latino Decisions found in their own poll ahead of the elections that Latinos placed more importance on immigration than other issues.

Carson has made his views on immigration before. In an opinion piece in the Washington Times, the Republican hopeful alluded to President Barack Obama's executive orders on immigration

"The founders of our nation feared that the time would arise when an individual or group of individuals in our government would become intoxicated with their power and attempt to impose their will upon the entire society through dictatorial decrees rather than through the legal process established by our Constitution," he wrote.

However, even within the GOP there have been calls to change the way the party address immigration. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is also running for Republican Party's nominee, has said the tone must change.

Former deputy campaign manager for Mitt Romney, Katie Packer Gage, also said Republicans need to change on the topic.

"I saw firsthand how the rhetoric on immigration during the GOP primary, from all of the candidates, painted our party in a negative light and came back to bite us in the general election," she said in a media release, reported the Las Vegas Sun.