In California, a bloc of New American Voters — recently naturalized citizens that have earned the right to vote — has the potential to play an outsized role in the outcomes of critical federal and state races.

This voting bloc is multiracial, multigenerational, geographically diverse, and majority female. New American Voters hold distinct ideologies, experiences, and viewpoints, and will be motivated by a variety of issues this November.

California will be one of the most critical states during the November 2022 midterm elections and New American Voters can sway the outcome.

California ranks 14th in the nation according to the New American Voters Impact Model, which was created by the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA) and the U.S. Immigration Policy Center (USIPC) at the University of California, San Diego to showcase the potential of this critical voting bloc to influence the outcome of midterm elections in 50 states.

This report offers data that illustrates how New American Voters can have an outsized impact.

• California is home to 733,756 citizens naturalized between 2016 and 2020. The state leads the country in the number of newly naturalized citizens.
• California’s newly naturalized citizens are racially and ethnically diverse, with approximately 48 percent from Asia, approximately 41 percent from the Americas, 7 percent from Europe, and approximately 3 percent from the African continent.
• Approximately 53 percent of California’s newly naturalized citizens are below the age of 45 and more than 56 percent were women.
• The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan area has the state’s highest concentration of naturalized citizens, at about 2.6 million, followed by the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metropolitan area with over 1 million, and then the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan area with approximately 590,000.

California’s cohort is part of an estimated 5.19 million newly naturalized citizens across the U.S., according
to New American Voters 2022: Harnessing the Power of Naturalized Citizens, a report released by NPNA, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), APIAVote, and USPIC. The power of this potential voting bloc is determined by individuals’ ability to both register and vote this November.

This electoral season presents many challenges, including the need for organizations to adapt their voter engagement work to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, language access issues , and ongoing efforts to tighten and restrict access to voting, particularly targeting voters of color.

One form of voter suppression that has emerged in recent years is the increasing backlog and processing delays of citizenship applications.

According to the latest data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), there are over 700,000 pending citizenship applications nationwide, with 144,763 applications backlogged in USCIS’ offices in California.

While the national average processing delay is around 11months, approximately 80 percent of applications are processed within 15.5 months in USCIS’ Los Angeles office and approximately 80 percent of applications are processed within 14.5 months in USCIS’ San Diego office.

This means that immigrants who are eligible for citizenship and who would have otherwise naturalized and have had time to register to vote in this year’s elections may not be able to do so given the naturalization application backlog.

California-based organizations, including the Asian Law Alliance, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance (OCAPICA), and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are partnering with NPNA’s New American Voters Campaign, a non-partisan nationwide effort to address naturalization barriers and encourage newly naturalized citizens to register and vote.