Regardless of whether House majority leader Eric Cantor’s shocking defeat was caused by the issue of immigration, two significant new polls seem to indicate that the great majority of Americans, including many conservative Republicans, continue to be in favor of it. A poll issued on Wednesday by the center-right group American Action Forum showed that four out of five people who primarily vote Republican want a step-by-step method of dealing with immigration reform.
This is also the method that the House of Representatives has claimed it would prefer to use, rather than one comprehensive immigration reform bill, but it has yet to take any action other than to pass a handful of individual bills through committees.
Cantor lost his primary race on Tuesday and has since announced that he will step down from his House of Representatives leadership position during the summer. He lost to a candidate who says he is against giving “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants. Cantor had worked on the immigration issue; however, he was still regarded as an obstacle to getting legislation passed in the House.
The results of a different poll, which was conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution and was released on Tuesday, discovered that 62% of Americans believe in giving immigrants the chance to get US citizenship. This figure is almost unchanged from 12 months earlier. More than 1,500 people were interviewed by phone for this poll.