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Marco Rubio speaks during a town hall campaign stop in New Hampshire this week. Photograph: Jim Cole/AP

Marco Rubio insists he supports immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, even as he has shifted from once backing a comprehensive overhaul of the system to now advocating a piecemeal approach.

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But during time spent with Rubio on the presidential campaign trail, attempting to get underneath the rhetoric and into the specifics of his immigration plan proves challenging. Should the Florida senator secure the Republican nomination, immigration could be a critical factor in his chances of reaching the White House.

Rubio says he has simply changed his tactics, not his broader position, on how to resolve a decades-long debate. But immigration advocates believe the devil is in the details and Rubio, at least for now, appears reluctant to identify the metrics and timetables they say are crucial to ensuring that the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US can even apply for work permits, let alone citizenship.

Presidential candidates on both sides have recognized the growing influence of Latino voters, and Rubio, the son of working class Cuban immigrants, is seen as one of the Republicans best hopes of bringing into its fold a demographic that has overwhelmingly favored the Democrats.

But with immigration driving a wedge between Republican primary voters, Rubio has tried to straddle both sides of the immigration debate maintaining that he is personally open to green cards for undocumented immigrants but emphasizing an enforcement-first approach.

During town halls in New Hampshire and Iowa over the past few months and at a Latino forum in Nevada last week, Rubio has answered questions on immigration by laying out the same step-by-step process. His plan begins first and foremost with securing the border. Then he will seek to modernize the legal immigration system and only once those steps are complete, he says, will he begin to address those 11 million undocumented immigrants.

He has said quite clearly that undocumented immigrants would not be eligible to apply for work permits until the first two steps of his plan were met.

Its just impossible to get people to even vote on [work permits] until weve done the other things, Rubio told reporters in Las Vegas last week, after the Guardian asked when undocumented immigrants would be eligible to apply for work permits under a Rubio administration.

When the Guardian posed a follow-up question on how a Rubio administration would determine that illegal immigration was under control and who would decide an appropriate number the senator remained vague.

People need to see and honestly believe that the problem is not getting worse, that its getting better

Ultimately wed have to work on what that number is and what people think is reasonable, Rubio said. Its never been zero so it wont be zero, but it cant be what it is now.

People need to see and honestly believe that the problem is not getting worse, that its getting better. And until we are achieving that, I dont think were going to have the political support that we need to move forward on the other pieces of it.

The answers were consistent with what Rubio first detailed in American Dreams, a book he released earlier this year that confirmed his preference for moving immigration bills in individual pieces. The shift came after Rubio co-authored a comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate in 2013 but died in the House of Representatives amid intense opposition from conservatives over its inclusion of a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.

The Republican primary electorate remains deeply divided on immigration and ranks border security as a matter of utmost importance. One faction likens any path to citizenship or even legal status to amnesty. This has been seized upon by real-estate mogul Donald Trump, the presidential frontrunner whose sharp anti-immigration rhetoric stands in contrast to the stance of pro-reform candidates like Rubio.

Rubios predicament has often been on display as he travels the country with a pitch rooted in his own story. The topic of immigration is raised often, from town halls to local and national interviews and shouts from occasional protesters.

Rubios answer is the same each time. He first identifies three problems: illegal immigration that is out of control, a broken legal immigration system, and the fact that millions of immigrants are already in the country illegally. Then, drawing on the failure of his own bill, he underscores that his piecemeal approach is the only viable option.

Related: US immigration reform bill passes Senate in rare breakthrough

You have to deal with all three of these things, the problem is you cant deal with all of that at once, Rubio said at a Las Vegas forum hosted by the Libre Initiative, a grassroots conservative group that aims to make inroads among Hispanic voters. I know, we tried. We dont have the votes. We dont have the support to do it that way.

Youre not going to round up and deport 11 or 12 million people, and youre also not going to blanket award 11 or 12 million citizenship cards.

But as Rubio went through his plan enhance border security by beefing up personnel and fencing off certain sections; set up an entry-exit tracking system to crack down on visa overstays; move toward a merit-based visa system, away from the current family-based system the mostly Hispanic audience reserved its applause for the mention of green cards.

For the latter step, Rubio laid out a pathway that mirrored his Senate bill: undocumented immigrants would pass a background check, learn English, pay a fine, start paying taxes and get a work permit. They would remain in that status for at least 10 years, after which Rubio said he would personally support allowing some to apply for a green card.

What Rubio didnt say was what security triggers he would support for the legalization process to commence, other than that it was imperative to prove to skeptics that illegal immigration was under control.

Advocates are far from sold. Daniel Garza, executive director of the Libre Initiative and moderator of the Las Vegas forum, said he agreed with Rubios framing of the political limitations around immigration reform.

But Garza said he was concerned that Rubio had yet to define the security measures and proof points that would show enforcement was working, to trigger a path to work permits and green cards.

He said, were not going to control all of [illegal immigration], were just going to bring it under control so thats very vague, Garza said. Are we securing the border entirely? How do we at least mitigate it to the point where now we can talk about these other pieces?

At least lets get the certainty of a work-visa program for the 12 million [undocumented immigrants] Hes for it, hes said that, which is great. But how long is it going to take? And thats the million-dollar question.

The Senate bill Rubio co-sponsored included security triggers, such as a goal of intercepting 90% of people trying to cross the border illegally in high-risk areas.

The bill also included a requirement that a specific plan for gaining operational control of the border be created, funded and initiated within six months of the bills enactment, before undocumented immigrants could apply for work permits. And it established a 10-year timetable for specific benchmarks, such as mandatory employment verification and the implementation of an entry-exit tracking system to stop visa overstays, that would open the path to permanent residence and then citizenship.

Frank Sharry, director of Americas Voice, a progressive immigration reform advocacy group, said Rubios plan to disconnect the triggers from the path to citizenship essentially meant no reform.

The step-by-step approach, he said, would rest on a hypothetical scenario in which Republicans either changed their mind about a path to legal status or Democrats were suddenly willing to embrace measures they have already ruled out, such as cutting family reunification visas.

Rubio says now that once Republicans believe and see that illegal immigration is under control, based on goalposts he refuses to set and specify, in a time frame that extends beyond his presidency, immigrants could be allowed to get work permits and someday citizenship, Sharry said.

[Rubio's] isnt a realistic strategy, its a cruel joke. For years Republicans have kept moving the goalposts

That isnt a realistic strategy, its a cruel joke. For years Republicans have kept moving the goalposts on what constitutes a secure border because it allows them to avoid the issue of legalizing undocumented immigrants, an issue that divides the GOP.

Rubio has certainly left himself with plenty of room to pivot in a general election, to a plan both more specific and more likely to succeed. But whether he has left himself enough space to attract sufficient support from Hispanic voters which his own pollster said earlier this year would need to be somewhere in the mid-40s, or better for a Republican to win the general election is hard to say.

Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center, said Democrats have had a sizable advantage over Republicans among Latino voters. He did caution, however, that support for a pathway to citizenship is not necessarily a dealbreaker among the voting bloc that ranks jobs and the economy as its top priority and could settle for a candidate who simply supports legal status.

But Lopez acknowledged that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, has enjoyed broad favorability among Latino voters which will likely be compounded by her early and aggressive courtship of a demographic that twice voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.

Clinton has positioned herself further to the left on issues like providing undocumented immigrants with drivers licenses and promising to defend and even expand Obamas executive orders on immigration. The president has signed two major actions to date: one in 2012 that provided deportation relief to millions of undocumented young people who came to the US as children, known as DREAMers, and another last year that would extend the program to millions of parents of US citizens and legal permanent residents.

Rubio has said he would end both programs as president, arguing that such reforms should be debated through the legislative process and not enacted using executive authority. But that position has been met with objections from immigration activists who at times show up to protest his events.

After one town hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, an undocumented immigrant confronted Rubio on why he would seek to end Obamas executive actions at a time when the threat of deportation could separate millions of families. Rubio responded by noting that the US, like every country, has immigration laws and must enforce them.

Democrats and some pro-reform advocates have attacked Rubios narrative, arguing that his enforcement-heavy immigration plan could very well postpone the debate over a path to citizenship until after his presidency. At a campaign stop in Florida late last month, the Guardian asked Rubio for his response to that assertion.

He reiterated his three-step plan and his openness to undocumented immigrants eventually applying for green cards, not through a special pathway but through the same one that everyone is using, and thats consistently been my plan.

David Damore, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who has focused on Latino voting trends, suggested Rubio will need to make a harder sell on his consistency.

At this point hes pretty much got every position on immigration at some point in the last couple of years, Damore said. If it looks like its political expedience, thats problematic.

Following his events last week in Las Vegas, Rubio defended his stance as very reasonable and said he was confident most Hispanic voters would agree.

Speaking in Spanish after a Spanish-language news outlet asked if he risked turning away Latino voters with his emphasis on enforcement, he said: I think I have the support of the majority of people in this country, including Hispanics, for enforcing our laws, so that the problem doesnt continue to get worse, and to deal in a responsible way forward for the people who are here.

Pressed further on whether he was giving up on immigration reform, Rubio insisted he was committed to the process.

I want to push a result, he said. I dont just want to have a position on it, I want us to fix it.

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Marco Rubio and immigration reform: the devilry is in the ...