The sleeping giant of newly naturalized voters awakens
New York might be the city of immigrants, but the growing population of new Americans in battleground states will have a direct impact on who wins the presidential election this year and beyond.
“When you look at the 2020 margin of victory, you see that Arizona was won by 10,457 votes, and in Arizona alone, since 2020, we have 62,000 newly naturalized voters — these are folks who decided to go for it and to become a citizen,” said Nicole Melaku, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans. “Of course, that electorate is going to have a decisive factor on the outcome of the Electoral College in Arizona. Nevada was won by 33,596 votes. There’s a new American naturalized population of 41,360 people.
“Without having to slice and dice the map, one can ascertain that these voting blocks of new people are within the margin of victory in some of these places.”
Nationally, one eligible voter in 10 is a naturalized citizen, according to the Pew Research Center. New York State boasts 2.7 million foreign-born eligible voters, roughly 19% of the population. There are around 2.5 million Black naturalized citizens nationally.
How can new Americans be encouraged to get more civically engaged? Melaku said that early engagement can help, pointing to advocacy organizations registering people to vote during their naturalization oath ceremonies.
Here in New York City, language materials play a key role, given the city’s diversity. Perry Grossman, director of the NYCLU’s Voting Rights Project, cited recent local efforts to expand language-access beyond the national expectation, including the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York.
“We publish materials in a lot of different languages and do what we can to get it out there,” Grossman said. “There are translation services available, because we certainly have just a ton of language diversity here in New York City, but again, new Americans, by definition, are typically just getting introduced to the political infrastructure of our city [and] of our country, and so it takes a lot of contact and a lot of work to make sure that they’re being successfully incorporated into the electorate.”
Still, there’s work to do. After all, more than 800 languages are spoken across the state.
“By providing election assistance in someone’s first language, you’re really making them feel welcome in the political process,” said Grossman. “It’s not that ‘you’re a foreigner who’s privileged to participate,’ but rather that ‘you are someone who we anticipate and encourage and expect to participate in the political process’ — language systems [are] really important on that score.
“When it comes to [people in] places or communities with smaller diasporas [and] less widely spoken languages, they can feel a lot more challenging. There are simply not enough official channels to target all those groups, particularly given the real breadth of language diversity in New York City.”
Political participation and socioeconomic status are famously intertwined and new Americans are no exception.
“Naturalization over the last decade has become increasingly more expensive for a variety of reasons,” said Melaku. “USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service] is a self-funded agency that basically funds itself through the collection of fees, and that leaves the working poor out of a lot of the conversation — we have low-income communities for which [a] $785-plus legal consultation would be a considerable chunk of a weekly budget or monthly budget.
“One of the things that we advocate for is to keep the cost of citizenship affordable and accessible to low-income communities. That’s one barrier people face: the cost.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
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