NALEO, Day 1: There was a doctor in the house!

Dr. Ben Carson is right about one thing: Education is the key to achieving the American dream.

In fact, Carson is the very embodiment of that philosophy. Raised by a mom who had just a third-grade education, and an admitted “bad student,” Carson said he was forced to read books as a child. That sparked a love of learning that drove him to seek out extra attention from his teachers and thrive in an inner-city Detroit high school.

He went on to attend Yale University, and become a neurosurgeon.

“You know, America is still a place of dreams. And that’s why it attracts so many people here,” said Carson, in his speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials at the Aria hotel-casino in Las Vegas. “And it’s wonderful that our creator gave us the ability to dream, because dreams are sometimes the only things that carry people through the dark times.”

But, Carson added, the point of education is that it’s up to individuals to take advantage of educational opportunity, and take responsibility for their lives and for their success in life.

In a 15-minute address, Carson spoke about American values, religious faith, immigration and unity in politics.

“And also, the thing that I think threatens to destroy us almost quicker than anything else as a nation is division,” Carson said. “We’re allowing the purveyors of division to come into our midst and to make us think that we’re each other’s enemy. So you have people who will come in and try to tell you there’s a war on women, there’s racial wars, there’s age wars, there’s income wars, there’s religious wars, there’s a war on virtually everything. And that can only occur if we the people are foolish enough to allow it to happen. Because the fact of the matter is, our strength lies in our unity.

“We the American people are not each other’s enemies. It’s the people who are trying to divide us who are the enemies,” he added.

Carson didn’t shy away from immigration as an issue, saying the country needs to seal its borders completely. But he also set himself apart from some Republicans who reject a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are currently living in America.

“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, I’m afraid of somebody from Syria who wants to bomb us, who wants to do bad things,” Carson said. “But in the meantime, we do have an illegal immigration problem that would be solved if you seal the borders and you cease the benefits so that people wouldn’t see a reason to come here.”

The Carson plan for immigration? “What we should do, I believe, is provide them a way that they don’t have to hide in the shadows,” he said. “Give them an opportunity to become guest workers, they have to register, they have to enroll in a back-tax program, and if they want to become citizens, they have to get in the line with everybody else and do what’s necessary because we have to pay homage to the people who’ve done it the right way.”

Carson said America was a Judeo-Christian nation, and decried what he said was an increasingly inability to talk about faith in public life. “We are a nation of values and principles. And we have been so busy in recent years giving away all of our values and principles for the sake of political correctness than we no longer know who we are, ” he said.

He noted the creator was referenced in our “founding document,” the Declaration of Independence, and the fact that God was referenced in the pledge of allegiance and on U.S. currency.

But in our actual founding document, the U.S. Constitution, God is not mentioned at all; in fact, the Bill of Rights contains a specific prohibition on establishing any religion in the United States. Moreover, the reference to endowment of rights by our creator in the Declaration of Independence is inconsistent to even a Cliff’s Notes understanding of Christian theology. Not only that, but the addition of “under God” in the pledge and the adopting of “in God we trust” as a national motto took place in the 1950s, in order to set America apart from the officially atheist USSR during the Cold War. (The motto had appeared on U.S. currency off and on since the end of the Civil War.)

Carson was the only Republican who responded to the NALEO’s invitation to speak. Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are scheduled to speak to the group on Thursday and Friday, respectively.