CORAL GABLES, Fla. — Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he would represent “100 percent” of Americans, striving to dampen a controversy that has dogged him since Monday, when video surfaced of him saying nearly half the nation’s voters were dependent on the government and would never support him because he would not be able to convince them to take responsibility for their lives.

“My campaign is about the 100 percent in America. And I am concerned about them. I am concerned about the fact that over the past four years, life has become harder for Americans,” Romney said. “... this campaign is about helping people who need help, and right now, the people who are poor in this country need help getting out of poverty. The people in the middle class need help because their incomes have gone down every year for the last four years.”

The GOP presidential nominee spoke at a Univision forum where he was asked whether he regretted the statement he made to donors in a recording that was disclosed Monday by Mother Jones. He did not respond to that part of the question.

Much of the discussion focused on immigration, and reconciling hard-line positions that Romney took during the GOP primary with his current efforts to court Latino voters, a growing force in American politics that overwhelmingly votes Democratic.

Romney made no news on immigration policy, but he tried to argue that President Barack Obama has failed Latinos by not tackling immigration reform during his first year in office, as he said he would do while running for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

“I think one of the reasons candidate Obama got so much support from the Hispanic community in the last election is that he said in the first year, among his highest priorities would be to fix the immigration system. But he never even filed a bill,” Romney said. “He never even tried to fix the immigration system. So it’s time to put politics aside, and I will actually fix the immigration system and make it work for the people of America.”

Romney slammed Obama for using an executive order to allow some people who were brought in the country illegally when they were young remain here legally, saying it was an election-year effort that failed to permanently fix the matter.

But pressed by a moderator, he declined to specify what he would do with these young people, aside from reiterating that he does not believe in mass deportation and that he would allow those who joined the military to live in the country legally.

“We need a long-term solution,” Romney said. “... This is something that is going to have to be worked out by Republicans and Democrats together.”