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WASHINGTON (AP) -- When it comes to immigration, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agree. It's just that they don't want to say so.

Instead, the White House rivals accuse one another of flinching when it mattered most, during and after last year's Senate debate on a bill that would have given millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

McCain "was a champion of comprehensive reform, and I admired him for it," Obama said Saturday in an appearance before The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. "But when he was running for his party's nomination, he walked away from that commitment and he's said he wouldn't even support his own legislation if it came up for a vote."

McCain had spoken earlier in the day to the same group, and his campaign swiftly countered his rival's charge. "Obama put politics first and supported 'poison pill' efforts to kill the immigration reform compromise last year," it said in a written rebuttal.

If the disagreement seems somewhat forced, the motives behind it are straight forward.

The issue is important to Hispanics, who make up a large and growing minority of the electorate, and may hold the balance of power this fall in the potential battleground states of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico as well as Florida.

Obama is out to win over as many as possible of the 75 percent of Democratic primary voters who chose Hillary Rodham Clinton over him, and then begin attracting Latino voters who went for President Bush in 2004.

As a Republican, McCain has a somewhat more complicated challenge. He can't afford to have conservatives who view immigration legislation as amnesty sit out the election. But he also can't allow his share of the Hispanic vote to recede to pre-Bush levels.

Based on McCain's words and Obama's voting record, there is a measure of truth in what both sides say, even though the two men supported the bill with provisions to secure borders, crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, expand guest worker programs and provide a path to citizenship for millions in the country illegally.

McCain and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., were leading advocates of the measure, which died in the Senate amid criticism that it offered amnesty to illegal immigrants.

It was a claim that contributed to the near collapse of McCain's presidential candidacy last summer, as he frequently acknowledged. Over and over, the Arizona senator told campaign audiences he had gotten the message, and border security would henceforth come first.

On Saturday, addressing a group of influential Latino officials with the presidential nomination in hand, there was no explicit mention of a path to legal status for those in the country illegally. Yet he sounded resolute wanting to pass comprehensive immigration legislation.

"It will be my top priority yesterday, today and tomorrow," he said. "We have to secure our borders ... but we also must proceed with a temporary worker program that is verifiable and truly temporary. We must also understand that 12 million people are here, and they are here illegally, and they are God's children," he said.

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