(CNN) — Less than a week after President Barack Obama highlighted his immigration proposals in Las Vegas, a new poll Monday shows 70 percent of Hispanics approve of the job he’s doing.
The number is slightly down from December, when 75 percent of Hispanics said they felt the same way, according to the Gallup survey.
The month-long tracking poll was conducted mostly before and partially after the president outlined his immigration proposals in Nevada last week.
Gallup, however, points out that the 70 percent mark is 12 percentage points higher since the same poll was conducted in August, shortly before the Democratic National Convention. It’s also up 17 percentage points since last February.
The poll results come one day before Obama is set to meet with leaders of labor unions, progressive groups and some CEOs at the White House to discuss immigration reform.
Speaking last week, Obama focused on three areas: better enforcement of immigration laws, providing a path to citizenship for the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country, and reforming the legal immigration system.
Groups in Congress are working to craft their own legislation, but if they fail to pass a comprehensive plan, Obama said he would introduce a bill of his own. He said in a Telemundo interview last week he would like to see legislation get passed “in the first half of the year if possible.”
While the president didn’t make immigration a big focus in his first term, his administration did announce in June that certain young, undocumented immigrants could apply to defer deportation. The policy won strong favor among likely voters, a majority of whom favored the decision, according to polls conducted shortly after the policy was announced.
Obama overwhelmingly won Latinos in the presidential election, with 71% backing the incumbent president and 27% supporting GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
The Gallup results are based on telephone interviews conducted with a random sample of 1,288 Hispanics from January 1 to January 31. Roughly one-third of those interviews were conducted in Spanish. The sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.
