Naturalized citizens could have an impact on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, according to experts.
Naturalized citizens made up a record number of eligible voters in 2022, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. Almost 24 million naturalized citizens were eligible to vote that year, accounting for about 10 percent of the U.S. electorate. And the numbers have grown since then as the federal government continues processing citizenship applications at the fastest rate in a decade.
Applications are now being processed in just under five months on average as President Joe Biden‘s administration works to reduce a backlog built up during Donald Trump‘s administration and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Almost four million immigrants have gained U.S citizenship since the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times reported last month, citing federal government figures.
More than half of the nation’s naturalized citizens live in California, Florida, New York and Texas, according to Pew. While they are unlikely to affect the presidential race, the possibility of swinging the outcome is greater for those who live in the closely contested battleground states.
Naturalized citizens make up 14 percent of eligible voters in Nevada and 9 percent of the electorate in Arizona. They account for seven percent of eligible voters in Georgia, about five percent of eligible voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan and about three percent in Wisconsin.
Georgia had the largest number of naturalized citizens eligible to vote out of the swing states in 2022, with 574,000, followed by Pennsylvania with 546,000, according to Pew.
Biden narrowly won both Georgia and Pennsylvania in 2020, and the contest between Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and Trump, the Republican nominee, in those states is set to be among the closest in November.
Some 7.4 million immigrants are likely eligible to naturalize, the American Immigration Council said in a report released in January.
The report noted that in six swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin—the number of people likely eligible to naturalize outnumbers the margin of victory in the 2020 election.
About 158,000 people were likely eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship in Georgia—where Biden won in 2020 by a margin of less than 12,000 votes—while 153,300 were likely eligible in Pennsylvania, where about 80,000 votes decided the 2020 election.
The report said about 164,400 people can apply for citizenship in Arizona, where Biden won by about 10,000 votes in 2020.
Another 102,000 people were likely eligible to apply for citizenship in Nevada, which Biden carried by about 33,000 votes in 2020. North Carolina, which Trump won in 2020 by about 75,000 votes, had some 138,200 people likely eligible to naturalize. Wisconsin, which Biden won by about 20,000 votes, had about 47,000 people likely eligible to naturalize.
While it’s not clear how many will be able to become U.S. citizens and thus eligible to vote in time for November’s election (and those who have not at least started the process will certainly not be able to), if enough do so in the crucial swing states, these new voters could—in theory—influence the outcome of the election.
The votes of naturalized citizens “will be crucial and potentially decisive in swing states that will likely be carried by razor-thin margins by one of the presidential contenders,” Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, told Newsweek.
But Panagopoulos cautioned that naturalized citizens are “not a monolithic group” and are “very diverse.”
He said Mexicans “make up the largest share of naturalized citizens, second to Indians and then other Asian immigrants from places including China, the Philippines and Vietnam.”
“Latino voters have favored Democrats in past elections, but polls suggest that advantage may be eroding. By contrast, South East Asians have ‘one of their own’ on the ballot in the candidacy of Kamala Harris. Many naturalized citizens eligible to vote do not do so, but foreign-born Hispanics and Asians tend to vote at higher rates than U.S.-born Hispanics and Asians.
“Both presidential campaigns will identify and target potential supporters in battleground states, and naturalized citizens are no exceptions. Their votes will be just as important, and possibly just as pivotal, as any others in these states,” he said.
Grant Davis Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, agreed that “in an election thought to be as close as this one, anything like this could matter.”
“It’s reasonable to assume that these new citizens are more likely to vote Democratic, so this indeed could be an advantage in those battleground states. Regardless of the intention, I’m sure Democrats up and down the ballot are happy to learn about this development,” Reeher said.
Jason Cade, a law professor at the University of Georgia, noted that citizenship approvals are happening at a faster rate now because the Trump administration “walled up the processing of routine immigration applications like a dam so that even completely straightforward naturalization applications could only trickle through.”
Cade said: “The story here is primarily one in which the Biden administration has worked to restore routine channels for lawful immigration and pathways to citizenship that Congress has long set forth in the Immigration and Nationality Act.”
But Cade said he thinks it’s unlikely that “the return to normalcy in the processing of citizenship applications will tip the outcome of the coming election in Georgia or elsewhere.”
“Bear in mind that noncitizens are only eligible to apply to naturalize after at least five years in permanent resident status in the United States, and many held other statuses (e.g. employment-based visas) before that,” he said.
“So the naturalization-eligible population has by definition lived in the United States for a long period of time—long enough to have their world views and political opinions shaped by the same experience-based mix that influence the outlooks of their natural-born citizen neighbors.
“And it’s clear that naturalized citizens—including those who come from the same parts of the world—are far from monolithic when it comes to political outlook, as we clearly saw in the last two presidential elections.”
