Americans are sharply split on their reaction to President Barack Obama’s recent executive actions on immigration that will essentially give amnesty to about five million undocumented immigrants,according to a new poll.
The latest Quinnipiac University survey released Tuesday found that 45 percent of voters support the president’s move, while 48 percent opposes it.
Support for illegal immigrants was also at an all-time low in this survey. Quinnipiac found that just 48 percent of voters believe undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay with a path to citizenship, down from 57 percent in November of 2013. Around 35 percent of survey respondents said undocumented immigrants should be required to leave the U.S., up from 26 percent last year.
“While President Barack Obama’s popularity wallows, support for immigrants wanes as Americans look at immigration reform with ambivalence,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a news release.
But while Americans don’t support Obama’s executive action, they are mostly united in the way they don’t want Congress to respond to it.
About 68 percent of the respondents were against Congress shutting down “major activities of the federal government” as a way to block Obama’s immigration move. Just 25 percent said they would support a shutdown in this case.
The results of this survey paint a picture of the country as a whole, but separate surveys showed support for Obama’s executive action from millennials and Latino voters.
In a survey conducted by Latino Decisions and commissioned by two pro-immigration reform groups, nearly 90 percent of Latino voters said they “support” or “strongly support” Obama’s executive action.
A national poll by Hart Research Associates found that 72 percent of voters under 35 supported the president’s action.
