Naturalized voters at the polls

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, November 13th

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Voting after becoming an American citizen.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people gain the right to vote by going through the legal process to become naturalized U.S citizens.

MAST: WORLD’s Bekah McCallum and I spent time on election day talking to voters in the Atlanta area. We ended up speaking to a few about what issues drove their decisions at the polls this year.

AUDIO: [Sound of voters at the polls]

An estimated 150 million American voters headed to the polls last week. The Pew Center estimates 10 percent of those eligible to vote are naturalized citizens.

KAMBAFWILE: Originally Zambia. That’s my nationality.

AZIZ: Yes, I was born in Afghanistan.

VO: I’m Vietnamese.

Since the last Presidential election, US Citizenship and Immigration Services reports more than 3 million people have become naturalized citizens.

CEREMONY: Are you ready to take the oath?

Audio of new citizens taking the Oath of Allegiance at a ceremony in New Jersey from NJ.com.

CEREMONY: Repeat after me, without my accent. [Laughter] I hereby declare … an oath…

These Americans weren’t born here, but went through a lengthy process to gain the rights of citizenship—including the right to vote.

JAMES CULP: For a lot of them, they want to be a part of that sort of American dream, a culture.

That’s James Culp with Learning Empowered, a group that helps immigrants through the process of becoming citizens. Culp says he saw a spike in citizenship applications in the last 18 months—many of them from people hoping to vote in the 2024 Presidential election.

CULP: They want to know they're in a country where the vote actually counts. Because I think a lot of them have such a poor view of voting, because they do come from pseudo-ish democracies where they're just happy to know that even if they vote for someone and they lose, just that it's it's a good system. Your vote counts.

For first-time voters, it’s an exciting moment.

NAVISIMO CHIFUNDO KAMBAFWILE: I got naturalized after last election so I couldn't of course vote but this year I was able to. Yay!

Navisimo Chifundo Kambafwile is a hospital patient advocate who lives in Forsyth County, Georgia. She’s originally from Zambia. There, citizens cast ballots regularly in multi-party elections but opposition parties sometimes face legal obstacles and sometimes speech is limited.

KAMBAFWILE: For me, the excitement is just that I did it, you know? And the piece that I can walk away saying, I did exercise my civil right. I'm just excited to have casted my vote, okay? Like, that's it.

Kambafwile voted for Kamala Harris. She explains why.

KAMBAFWILE: You know, being female. Just, you know, I celebrate a person of color, like just, um, the difference that she brings and then for me she just exudes love for me love and peace.

Outside a church in Gwinnett County, Anisa Aziz walked to the car with her son after they voted. This wasn’t their first election. The family came here from Afghanistan in the 1980s. Women there were granted the right to vote in 1919.

But since the Taliban regained power in 2021, the UN says they have increasingly limited women’s freedoms. Anisa said she was thinking of Afghanistan when she voted for Donald Trump.

ANISA AZIZ: Maybe he's so nice he was helpful all all of country he was helpful my country maybe he's nice I'm thinking maybe.

Sardar Aziz, Anisa’s son, is a realtor now, but says he served in the US Army for 12 years. The political instability in the world prompted him to vote for Trump as well—the first time he’s done so.

SARDAR AZIZ: I like his policies. I guess we can't afford to have four more years of war and economical issues. So that's why I voted for him. I think he'll do much better than his last term.

Twenty miles away, in Berkeley Lake, Georgia, T Vo was excited about voting for Trump.

VO: I cannot speak English good. But I love Trump because he love America. I'm American citizen. I am not Republican. I'm not Democrat. I love my country. My country is America.

Vo is 61. He came to America 40 years ago from Vietnam—a one-party Communist country. Freedom House says elections there technically allow other candidates, but in practice there isn’t much choice. Vo raised his family here, and they’ve thrived. His worries about the future of education. That’s what drove his choice this year.

VO: I have five children. But the education right now is very, very bad. And sometimes I want to send all my kids back to my country and study over there. It's better than America. But this is my country. I love my country. I want the education, you know, go up, cannot go down. I love children and that's it.

The Pew Center says that historically, naturalized citizens turn out to vote at a lower rate than US-born voters. In 2016, 54 percent of foreign-born citizens said they voted, compared to 62 percent of those born in America. James Culp says he wishes there were more programs to help inform new citizens about how to register to vote and where to go.

CULP: But if they don't have that, then they're just kind of in the weeds. And unfortunately, a lot of people, if they feel it's a certain degree sort of insurmountable, they tend to shut down.

He says for those who do register and vote, casting a ballot can be the final step in feeling that they’re truly an American.

VO: America is a freedom country, and I live here over 40 years. And this is my country.

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