Number of new U.S. citizens who can vote has doubled since 2000
by Tim Vandenack ksl · KSL.comKEY TAKEAWAYS
- The number of naturalized U.S. citizens eligible to vote doubled since 2000, though naturalizations have declined during President Trump's second term in office.
- Around 25 million naturalized citizens could vote as of 2024 about 10% of eligible U.S. voters, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
- Naturalized citizens account for 5.5% of eligible voters in Utah.
SALT LAKE CITY — The number of naturalizations during President Donald Trump's second term in office may be slipping, but the number of naturalized U.S. citizens eligible to vote steadily increased between 2000 and 2024, more than doubling.
In all, around 10% of the 250 million Americans eligible to vote this cycle are naturalized citizens — about 25 million people in all, according to Pew Research Center estimates. That's up from around 12 million naturalized citizens eligible to vote in 2000, which was 6.2% of the population at the time.
In Utah, the data shows that naturalized U.S. citizens 18 or older, the voting age, amounted to 5.5% of the overall voter-eligible segment in the state. That's less than the national figure and the 25th highest rate among the 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. — right in the middle. California had the highest figure, with naturalized citizens representing nearly 22% of the state's pool of eligible voters, followed by New Jersey and New York at 19.8% and 18.9%, respectively.
With voting this cycle coming to a head on Tuesday, the Trump administration has put an increasing focus on its worries about non-citizens voting in U.S. elections, which many say is relatively rare. Results of a preliminary review of Utah's voter rolls by Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson last May showed that 99.7% of registered voters were "verifiably U.S. citizens."
Last week's Pew report, though, doesn't examine the question of voting by non-citizens. Rather, it looks at another category of immigrants — those in the country who have gone through the process to become U.S. citizens, thus giving them the right to vote. It found that the vast majority have roots of more than 10 years in the country.
"Around 92% of naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote have lived in the U.S. for 11 years or more, including 73% who have lived in the country for 21 years or more," Pew said. Less than 8% of the pool of people have been in the United States for less than 10 years.
Among the naturalized citizens 18 or older, 33.2% are Hispanic, 32.3% are Asian, 20.1% are white and 10.7% are Black.
While the number of naturalized citizens who can vote is on an upward trajectory dating back to 2000, the number of immigrants who are completing the process to become U.S. citizens has dipped under Trump.
"The second Trump administration has pursued three strategies to restrict U.S. citizenship: ending birthright citizenship, making naturalization harder to obtain and prioritizing denaturalization," the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which advocates for immigrants, said in June.
Naturalizations edged past 800,000 in fiscal year 2024, according to figures from the U.S. Congress, before Trump's second term started. By contrast, the Washington Post reported late last month that federal immigration officials under Trump had approved citizenship applications for just 173,000 people in the first eight months of 2026, down 72% from the same period the year before.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.