WASHINGTON -- A bipartisan group of eight prominent senators Monday laid out an ambitious overhaul of the nation’s patchwork immigration system that would balance tougher border enforcement with creating a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants and new opportunities for seasonal farmworkers to gain legal status.

The senators beat President Barack Obama to the punch, scrambling to unveil their plan a day before Obama was scheduled to outline his own proposal in Nevada, a Western state with a rising tide of Hispanic residents.

While only in his first term, the star of the senators’ group was Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a charismatic Cuban-American who has tied his political fortunes and a potential 2016 White House run to his dramatic life story as the son of political refugees from Fidel Castro.

“I am clearly new to this issue in terms of the Senate,” Rubio told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference. “I’m not new in terms of my life. I live surrounded by immigrants. My neighbors are immigrants. I married into a family of immigrants. I see immigration every single day. I see the good of immigration. I see how important it is for our future.”

The high-powered group also included the second- and third-ranked Senate Democrats, Richard Durbin of Illinois and Charles Schumer of New York, along with 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolinian with a reputation as a maverick willing to work across party lines on tough issues. Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, also of Cuban descent, and Michael Bennet of Colorado joined the group, as did Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, just starting his first Senate term.

“It says quite a bit about our nation, about how many people want to come here in this free country with this opportunity for an expanding economy,” Durbin said. “They want to be here in America. But let’s be honest about it. . . . Our immigration system is broken. It has been broken for a long time.”

President George W. Bush, McCain, Graham and the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts led the last major push to pass an immigration overhaul, but it failed in June 2007 after a bitter fight that tied up the Senate for weeks.

But the 2012 presidential election results have altered the political landscape. Obama defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney overwhelmingly among Hispanic voters, leaving Republicans wary of alienating the country’s fastest-growing demographic group.

“The Republican Party is losing the support of our Hispanic citizens,” McCain said Monday. “And we realize that there are many issues in which we think we are in agreement with our Hispanic citizens, but this (immigration reform) is a pre-eminent issue with those citizens.”

Schumer said this may be the year Congress finds a breakthrough on a problem that has vexed the nation’s leaders for a quarter-century.

“The politics on this issue have been turned upside down,” Schumer said. “For the first time ever, there is more political risk in opposing immigration reform than in supporting it.”

The new bipartisan overhaul plan would allow the country’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants to obtain a green card only after fulfilling a number of requirements: registering with the government; passing a criminal background check; settling back taxes and paying a fine for having entered the United States improperly.