The speed of processing immigrant naturalizations has increased significantly during President Joe Biden's first three years in office. Concretely, some 2.66 million new immigrants were naturalized over the period, compared to about 2.31 million during the first three years of Trump's presidency.
Data for 2024 is not yet available.
In 2022, USCIS announced efforts to reduce a backlog of applications by increasing capacity, improving technology, and expanding staffing, with the goal of bring processing times below six months by the end of 2023.
The backlog decreased from 943,000 at the end of 2020 to 408,000 by the end of September 2023. Measures to speed up processing included simplifying forms and redirecting interviewees to less busy immigration offices. Additionally, fee waivers were introduced for lower-income immigrants, reducing costs to $380.
According to a Newsweek article, 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.
In the 2023 fiscal year, California, Florida, Texas, and New York accounted for over 50 percent of the 878,500 U.S. naturalizations, despite representing only about a third of the country's population. The majority of naturalized immigrants in 2023 came from Mexico, India, and the Philippines.
According to Newsweek, 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."
"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.
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