AUSTIN, Texas — A Democrat in the race for Texas’ U.S. Senate seat released an ambitious five-point immigration plan.

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio announced his bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz in July. He’s among a dozen other Democrats in the race, including North Texas Rep. Colin Allred, who’s widely considered the frontrunner and has out-raised his opponents substantially.

“Look, we’re doing fine financially and we have enough money to make our message get through this primary where we have an informed electorate,” Gutierrez said in an interview on Capital Tonight Wednesday. 

Like Allred, Gutierrez has racked up dozens of endorsements and said he’s focused on leaning on issues like immigration. 

His newly released plan includes what he calls a pathway to normalcy for undocumented workers, justice for Dreamers, a new work program for arriving migrants, fixing and streamlining the "alphabet soup" of visas and ending human trafficking and stopping drug cartels.

“We must fix this,” he said. “We have to solve this problem once and for all, and part of that fix means securing our border from these cartels. And you probably won’t hear a Democrat say we need to spend more money on the DEA like we did in the 1980s in Columbia.” 

Gutierrez acknowledged the years of congressional inaction on immigration, but pushed his plan as a way to also help the economy. 

“In order to fix our broken immigration system, you have to recognize first that we have 30 million job vacancies that we can fill in this country. We need to do that in a right way through an immigration system that retools our visas altogether, eliminates quotas, eliminates barriers to entry into the U.S. and allows people that want to come to work, have the opportunity to fill those jobs that Americans do not want,” he said. 

Click the video link above to watch our full interview with Sen. Gutierrez.