President Barack Obama was criticized by many after proposing an immigration reform that favors undocumented immigrants, but most Hispanics have expressed support to the new ruling.
A recent survey conducted by Gallup revealed that around 64 percent of Latinos in the United States approved Obama's executive order, which could spare around five million undocumented immigrants in the country from deportation.
Aside from Latinos in the country, 68 percent of non-Latino blacks also expressed support to the new policy, while 69 percent of documented immigrants also gave approval to Obama's order.
On the other hand, 62 percent of non-Latino whites ruled against it. Overall, 51 percent of Americans who participated in the poll disagreed.
However, Gallup pointed out that most of those who expressed opposition were not against sparing undocumented immigrants from deportation. They just want Obama to seek approval from the U.S. Congress instead of just making an executive order.
"Opposition to Obama's policy may have as much to do with his use of the executive order rather than the legislative process, or simply political opposition to Obama and his agenda more generally, as to the specifics of what he is proposing," Gallup noted.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio also voiced out his support to Obama's immigration reform, the NY Times reported.
De Blasio is reportedly planning to create a coalition of mayors in the country to fight for Obama's new policy on undocumented immigrants. He said that mayors' opinions about the issue have not been heard, but he is quite confident that they could convince their constituents to support the reform.
De Blasio convened mayors from 18 cities on Monday, and all of them vowed to convince other official to join the "coalition of the willing" that will lobby for the reform in Capitol Hill in February.
Most of the mayors who attended Monday's meeting represent cities with a big number of immigrants. According to the report, around 120,000 New Yorkers will be affected by Obama's immigration policy.
Leon Rodriguez, Obama's immigration chief, said that the immigration reform will affect the country's economy in a positive way as it will cement illegal immigrants' place in the society, Washington Times reported.
"If this program does what we want it to do, you will now have literally millions of people who will be working on the books, paying taxes, being productive. You cannot so easily by fiat now remove those people from the economy," Rodriguez said.
