The 2024 presidential election and other down-ballot races could be heavily impacted by the number of migrants naturalized since the last major election cycle.
Approximately 350,200 refugees and asylees have become naturalized between fiscal years 2021 and 2023 and are eligible to vote in this year's elections, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). An approximate total of 2.66 million refugees and asylees were naturalized in that same timespan (813,861 in FY 2021; 969,380 in FY 2022; 878,500 in FY 2023).
Refugee totals year by year, from 2021 to 2023, are as follows: 82,500, 103,000, and 29,000. Asylee totals in the same span totaled 30,500, 34,000, and 71,100.
Naturalization ceremonies in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 composed 24 percent of all naturalizations over the past decade. The U.S. fiscal year begins on October 1 and ends on September 30 of the following year.
"The widespread assumption that newly eligible immigrants will largely vote for Democrats seems mistaken," David Abraham, a law professor at the University of Miami who specializes in immigration, told Newsweek via email. "The immigrants' countries of origin and social classes are too diverse for any one pattern to emerge."
He added: "Many Latin Americans, regardless of how they first came to the U.S., will continue their preferences for strongmen and anti-left politics as we see most clearly in Florida and even Texas. Many Asians will be acculturated into communities favoring the Democrats, as we see in New Jersey and California, for example. Neither party and no candidate should take these voters for granted."
More than 23 million U.S. immigrants were eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election, composing about 10 percent of the U.S. voter electorate four years ago, according to the Pew Research Center.
As the number of immigrants who became eligible to vote rose some 93 percent between 2000 and 2020, the U.S.-born eligible voter population only grew about 18 percent during the same period—from 181 million in 2000 to 215 million in 2020.
In 2000, the foreign-born eligible voting population totaled about 12 million but nearly doubled two decades later to about 23.2 million. In that span, the foreign-born voting bloc rose from approximately 6.2 percent in 2000 to roughly 10 percent in the 2020 election, which pitted Joe Biden and Donald Trump in a close election that led to countless legal challenges.
Both individuals are on a trajectory to meet again this November, in what is likely to be another nail-biter that could be determined by thousands of votes in a few states.
More than three out of every four immigrants in the U.S. are naturalized citizens, reads a January 2024 report by the American Immigration Council.
Perhaps more importantly from a political perspective, the number of immigrants likely eligible to naturalize in key swing states outnumbered those states' margins of victory in the 2020 presidential election.
The Council projects that 31.6 million immigrants are naturalized or eligible to become citizens, including about 24.4 million who are already citizens. The 7.4 eligible immigrants who can become naturalized but, for whatever reason, have not done so represent about 33.6 percent of the noncitizen population.
The number of naturalized citizens is high, particularly among battleground states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, which had 584,000, 559,000, and 376,000 naturalized citizens, respectively, as of the report's publication.
About one in four naturalization-eligible, or some 2.2 million migrants, come from Mexico. They are followed by India (578,700), China (424,800), El Salvador (229,400) and Cuba (216,000).
Florida, once the premiere battleground state that has tilted more conservative in recent presidential and gubernatorial elections, has the highest naturalization rate in the country at roughly 82.7 percent.
California saw 154,900 new citizens become naturalized in the last fiscal year, increasing the state's total of naturalized citizens to more than 500,000 over the past three years. It was the only state to surpass six digits in terms of new naturalized citizens, far outpacing Texas (99,900), Florida (94,100), New York (92,800) and New Jersey (39,000).
Update 05/03/24, 10:19 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Abraham.
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Nick Mordowanec is a Newsweek reporter based in Michigan. His focus is reporting on Ukraine and Russia, along with social ... Read more
