Leonardo Angulo is 22 years old. He waited 18 years to become a U.S. citizen. He lives in Texas, grew up in the United States.
As soon as he was sworn in, he registered to vote.
“Since I registered I’ve been voting in the primaries and, of course, I plan to vote in 2020. It was one of the biggest goals I had throughout this process and I’ve met it. I’m happy,” he told Antonieta Cádiz of Univision Noticias, who published a report showing that naturalizations of Hispanics like Angulo could make a difference in next November’s U.S. presidential election.
Cádiz interviewed Diego Iniguez-Lopez, Campaigns and Policy manager at the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), an organization that advocates for immigrant civil rights in the United States. Among the NPNA’s campaigns is Naturalize Now, which seeks to encourage eligible immigrants to begin the process of naturalization. The goal of this campaign is for 1 million people to apply for U.S. citizenship by 2020.
“Helping immigrants obtain citizenship serves as an on-ramp to voter engagement and the many benefits that citizenship brings to immigrant communities,” the NPNA website notes.
Iniguez-Lopez is the author of a report according to which “more than 3.1 million people” have become U.S. citizens since Trump became president of the United States. “This includes a projection of 860,024 naturalized people for this fiscal year, calculated based on the trend seen in 2016,” writes Antonieta Cádiz.
The Trump administration is making it harder to qualify for U.S. citizenship, the report notes: a rule proposes raising application fees from $640 to $1,170, and there are also plans to demand applicants to do the citizenship interview “in a different office than the one they applied for, which could involve travel even outside their state.”
“We believe it is a priority for this administration to limit access and the barriers they have put in place have complicated the process for some,” says Iniguez-Lopez.
However, citizenship applications continue. “Although the Trump administration has done everything possible to limit the naturalization of immigrants, people have responded and applied for citizenship,” Iniguez-Lopez said.
According to Iniguez-Lopez’s report, the states of Florida, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona and Michigan have set naturalization records since 2017 and “will be key” to the next election.
Arturo Vargas, general director of the NALEO Educational Fund, says that legally resident immigrants are taking the step toward naturalization in response to Trump’s policies.
“We usually see such waves when immigrants feel besieged and threatened,” he told Antonieta Cádiz.
Things seem to be changing for the 2020 vote, but the difference will be made if Hispanics actually go out and vote. A poll commissioned by Telemundo to Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy, Inc, between October 24 and 28, 2019, found that 64% of Hispanics would remove Trump from the White House and vote for a Democrat to replace him, if the election were to be held.
A study from January 2019 from the Pew Research Center, signed by Anthony Cilluffo and Richard Fry, estimates that in 2020, for the first time, Hispanic voters will be the largest racial minority elegible to vote. That is 13% of elegible voters. Some 32 million Hispanics will be able to vote in 2020.
The research estimates that next year one-third of elegible voters will be non-white: one in ten potential voters will be born outside the United States, “the highest proportion since 1970.”
This new profile, say the study’s signatories, would have an impact on the results, “because nonwhites have long been significantly more likely than whites to back Democratic candidates.”