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By Nick Mordowanec
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The speed of processing immigrant naturalizations has risen sharply under President Joe Biden, increasing the number of new citizens eligible to vote in upcoming elections, official data shows.
Immigration is among the top issues for voters ahead of the November election, and Biden's critics say he has taken too soft an approach to stopping new arrivals crossing the border illegally as he faces a close race for the White House against former President Donald Trump, who has long demanded greater curbs on illegal immigrants.
Data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) shows that the average processing time for the N-400 application form used in naturalizations fell from 11.5 months in fiscal year 2021 to 6.1 months in 2023 and has averaged 5 months over the first eight months of fiscal year 2024, which started on October 1, 2023.
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The number of new migrants naturalized during Biden's first three years was around 2.66 million, compared to about 2.31 million during the first three years of Trump's presidency. Figures for 2024 were not yet available.
USCIS did not respond to Newsweek's requests for comment.
Naturalizations are not of immigrants who entered the United States illegally, but any increase in immigrant numbers is politically sensitive, particularly ahead of the election.
"Naturalization for at least a 20-year period has been a site of partisan contestation," Ahilan Arulanantham, a professor and co-director of UCLA's Center for Immigration Law and Policy, told Newsweek. "The Republican Party for some constituencies has tried to slow the naturalization process, and the Democratic Party has tried to speed it up."
USCIS said in 2022 that it aimed to cut a backlog of applications by increasing capacity, improving technology, and expanding staffing. The aim was to reduce the processing time for applications to below six months by the end of 2023.
The backlog fell more than half from 943,000 at the end of 2020 to 408,000 as of the end of September 2023, the latest month for which data was available.
Measures taken to speed up processing included simplifying confusing forms and redirecting interviewees from cities with busy immigration offices to others with greater capacity, USCIS said in an annual report to Congress in June. There have been additional waivers for immigrants on lower incomes, for whom fees are halved to $380.
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Immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens must be at least 18 and a lawful permanent resident for at least five years or at least three years if married to a U.S. citizen.
"Historically, elections have been a huge motivator for people to become citizens," Lucia Martel Dow, the director of the nonpartisan New Americans Campaign (NAC), which helps legal immigrants with the naturalization process, told Newsweek.
Roselia Navarro, 31, moved to Milwaukee from Mexico in 2006 at the age of 13 and was naturalized in April 2023. She told Newsweek that the main reason she naturalized was the right to vote. She declined to say how she would vote at her first election in November.
"I feel like it's good to have a voice in decisions that affect your community," she said.
The four most populous U.S. states—California, Florida, Texas and New York—collectively accounted for more than 50 percent of all 878,500 U.S. naturalizations that occurred in the 2023 fiscal year, even though they account for only about a third of the country's total population. The proportions were broadly similar in the three previous years.
The most naturalized immigrants in 2023 were from Mexico, which accounted for 111,500, India, with 59,100, and the Philippines, with 44,800.
A 2020 study of Latino voters showed that they supported Biden by at least a two-to-one margin in 12 of the 13 states with the highest Latino electorate—the exception being Florida. The list included Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—all of which are swing states that are widely expected to decide whether Biden or Trump wins the 2024 election.
"Immigrant voters could absolutely tip the 2024 elections—for Democrats and against Trump & MAGA—in the most critical swing states and districts," Zo Tobi, spokesperson for the grassroots Movement Voter Project (MVP) anti-Trump group, told Newsweek.
Despite the 2020 results, the Trump campaign has made a big push for the Latino vote.
"Under President Trump, people of all backgrounds were able to realize the American dream," Jaime Florez, Hispanic communications director of the Trump Campaign, told Newsweek. "Immigrant voters are supporting President Donald J. Trump because, under his leadership, we had a thriving economy, a secure border, and a defender of their constitutional and religious liberties."
The Biden campaign did not respond to Newsweek's request for comment.
USCIS does not clearly break down the number of new Americans by state, making it difficult to determine the potential impact in the states likely to have the greatest impact on the election.
But the number of immigrants potentially eligible to naturalize in battleground states makes clear how significant they could be.
Arizona, for example, has about 164,000 immigrants eligible to naturalize and Biden beat Trump there by 10,457 votes in 2020. Georgia's 158,000 immigrants could potentially swing a state that was decided in Biden's favor by 11,779 votes; Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes, and 153,300 immigrants could become naturalized.
In another swing state, Wisconsin, the 2020 vote disparity for Biden was 20,682. More than 47,000 immigrants are eligible for naturalization.
Approximately 7.4 million immigrants are eligible to apply for citizenship but haven't done so, according to a January 2024 report from the American Immigration Council.
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