New citizens in Michigan share what voting means to them

In the predominantly Latino community in southwest Detroit, Sergio Martinez knows how valuable citizenship and the right to vote is for his community.
He is a board member for Michigan United, an immigrant rights group that in part advocates for immigration reform.
“A lot of the people that we deal with are going to be first-time voters,” he said. “Not only first-time voters for themselves, but they get to represent their families that are in the shadows.”
Martinez compared the responsibility and pride of being a new American voter to being the first person in a family who graduates from college.
“You feel like you have a voice in the household because no one else can vote,” he said.
Michigan United board member Sergio Martinez speaking about immigration reform in Detroit, Michigan, in 2013. Photo courtesy of Martinez
Martinez is a former “Dreamer” who was brought to the United States by his family as a child. Although he now has temporary protection from deportation granted by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program, he is unable to naturalize or vote. In Michigan, as in other states and territories, only U.S. citizens are allowed to vote in state or federal elections.
New American voters, those who came to the U.S. as immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers, and have since become citizens, are an increasingly important group of voters in the United States. About 5 million immigrants and refugees became U.S. citizens between 2015 and 2020, and many voted for the first time in the 2020 presidential election, according to the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), an immigrant advocacy organization.
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The number of immigrant eligible voters, who all come from different countries around the world, reached new highs over the years. One in 10 eligible voters were immigrants in 2020, double what it was in 2000, according to the Pew Research Center. More than 3.5 million adults of voting age have naturalized since the last presidential election in 2020, according to New American Voters campaign, a collaboration between NPNA and the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego.
“Some new American voters have been citizens for many years but because of multiple barriers to voting, such as language access, access to information about the elections, transportation needs, have difficulty in casting their ballots,” said Becky Belcore, co-director of the nonprofit National Korean American Service and Education Consortium.
In Michigan, there are around 66,177 “newly naturalized citizens,” those who have naturalized across the state since 2016, according to NPNA. That number represents almost half of Biden’s 154,188-vote margin of victory in this swing state in 2020, showing the potential power of these voters.
More than 60 percent of Michigan’s newly naturalized citizens are under 45 years of age, and more than half are women. About 20 percent are also from Iraq, more than any other country.
Newly naturalized citizens make up about one in five of the 390,000 naturalized citizens across the state.
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Belcore said some people decided to naturalize as anti-immigrant rhetoric increased over the past several years, in part so that they will have more protections and rights. Some states have offered increased resources to assist immigrants and refugees to naturalize. Some community-based organizations such as Adoptees for Justice and Michigan United helped low-income communities with fees and helped immigrant communities with linguistic and cultural competency.
“When people try to adjust their status and they are residents and become citizens, we try to make sure that they speak English, they have the resources to register to vote and become new citizens,” Martinez said.
Given the opportunity, Martinez said that people are willing to go through the intensive process, even as many are wary of the risk that the information in their applications may be used to reverse their status, or to track down family and friends at their past addresses and workplaces.
A June survey from New American Voters found that 96 percent of new American voters surveyed said that they definitely or probably will vote in this year’s election. Eighty-two percent said that they are paying some or a lot of attention to the election, and 83 percent say that protecting democracy and government institutions are very or somewhat important for their vote.
We spoke to some new Americans who live or work in Michigan on what voting in this year’s election means to them.
Photo courtesy of Krishna Han
Even knowing the process would be long, expensive, and stressful, Krishna Han had no doubt that he wanted to become a U.S. citizen.
“I’ve been raised to value the importance of civically and politically engaged citizenship,” he said. “Citizenship allows me to participate in one of the most fundamental aspects of a functional democracy, which is voting to express my voice and what I believe is important for the better good of community and society.”
Immediately after his naturalization ceremony in Cleveland, Han asked the judge for a voter registration form. Then he went to buy a grill. “I wanted one that was big! I came home and hung both Cambodian and American flags side-by-side to start a new journey as a Cambodian American,” he said.
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Han takes his voting rights seriously. He said he feels empowered and responsible.
“Especially since I live in a swing state [Ohio], I believe my voice matters even more,” he added.
Han said he votes to express his voice, care, and concerns for the community and society, not only for himself but for the next generations to come, as well as international communities.
“The rise of authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and the corruption of the Supreme Court are extremely concerning. Gun violence has become a public health crisis, and corporate greed and their creeping influence on politics seem to be getting out of control, and [we are] witnessing constant attacks on minority rights and freedom.”
Katie Nealis was born in South Korea, adopted at the age of 4, and raised in a small northern Michigan town. She and her U.S.-citizen parents had assumed for 30 years that she was a U.S. citizen. One day in her 30s, Nealis was shocked to discover that was not the case.
“I never had [citizenship] to begin with, yet it felt like I had lost something monumental for good,” she said.
“So many people take voting for granted, especially if we grow up in the U.S. [We] think it’s a normal right and process,” Nealis added. “I did, too, and never thought much of it.”
For a person who had largely grown up in the U.S., Nealis felt the idea of having to apply for citizenship was daunting and overwhelming. She felt afraid of what her life would look like without the rights and protections of citizenship that she thought she had had all along.
“The fear was a major hurdle. I felt as though I needed to hide. It was hard to know where to start: how to get the right information, who I could talk to, finding legal counsel. And the fees were expensive,” she said.
Nealis got help from Adoptees for Justice and Korean Adoptee Adoptive Family Network to apply for citizenship.
Finally, she drove to the Detroit federal courthouse with her husband and friends.
“I shared the swearing-in ceremony with a room full of ecstatic fellow Americans and many happy tears of joy and relief,” Nealis said. Her first time voting felt so meaningful that it sharpened her resolve to protect the rights of those that may not have a voice within our political landscape.
“I’m excited to vote this year as it looks to be another historic election cycle with polarized constituents on both sides,” she said. “Some concerns that I’ll be voting for are reproductive rights, climate change, economic policies, and moral decency.
Along with immigration reform, she would love to see amendments made to the Childhood Citizenship Act through the passage of the Adoptee Citizenship Act to retroactively grant citizenship to adoptees who were left out of the first law.
Photo courtesy of Muhammad Imtiaz
This November will be Muhammad Imtiaz’s first time voting in a presidential election. He was born in Pakistan and immigrated to Canada with his parents as an infant. His family naturalized and became citizens in Canada, then came to the U.S. to seek better employment opportunities for his engineer father on a special visa for Canadians, and then naturalized again.
“There weren’t many jobs available for engineers in the part of Canada where we lived,” Imtiaz said. “The economy here [in Michigan] is so much more supportive for that career choice.”
Despite a few setbacks and delays, Imtiaz and his parents took their oaths of citizenship in Detroit in 2022, and he has voted in two primaries.
Imtiaz was recently talking with his father about how he might not vote this year because the options for president did not seem great, and he said his father told him that, “We can’t just not vote because then we as a community lose our voice.”
“Even when we were in Canada, my father was big on voting simply because he felt that it’s very important for us, particularly since we’re Muslim,” he added.
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With the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, Imtiaz said it is “very important that our community has a voice and is able to express that voice. And the way to do so in this system is by voting and making sure that we vote in large numbers so that we are visible.”
Imtiaz does not think either of the main presidential candidates has a great stance on the issue. He is trying to evaluate which candidate, or possibly a third-party candidate, would be best.
“Some people call us single-issue voters for this election cycle, but certainly I think that that’s the main issue on our minds,” he said. He is also concerned about other issues, like inflation, “but [Palestine] is primarily the litmus test that I would say that I’m using and they’re using.”
As a new citizen and new voter, Imtiaz said he believes people “ought to be grateful for the fact that, whatever flaws there may be, this country has a democratic system. People are able to express their voice.”
He said that many immigrants, including himself, come from countries where there is not so much choice or freedom of expression.
Photo courtesy of Ayesha Ghazi Edwin
Ayesha Ghazi Edwin’s mother told her that the day their family received their U.S. citizenship was one of the happiest days of her life.
Ghazi Edwin was born in England and came to the U.S. when she was three years old. Her parents had both come to Michigan on professional work visas, but it still took several years of paperwork and uncertainty to get their citizenship. After the entire family became U.S. citizens, her mother voted for the first time in her life. She had never voted when she lived in England or India.
“We were one of the lucky ones,” Ghazi Edwin said. Though her family was privileged to come to the U.S. for good jobs on work visas with employer support, she added, the country’s immigration law is still so complicated and expensive that “there’s a constant sense of insecurity. … It’s always a reminder as a kid that you don’t actually belong here.”
Her family’s immigration story “really shapes my sense of belonging in America,” said Ghazi Edwin, who is now an Ann Arbor city council member and chair of the governor’s advisory commission for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. She looks at voting and political participation as a privilege.
READ MORE: Why Arabic ballots are now being offered in Michigan and what this means for voter access in the U.S.
She has also seen how being an immigrant can affect an individual’s ability to vote. She has worked on voter protections and conducted exit polling on how Asian Americans were treated at voting locations in Detroit. She saw how immigrants with limited English proficiency were often mistakenly told that they were not allowed to bring a translator into the voting booth with them, or how poll workers were not able to communicate to limited-English-speaking voters that they were at the wrong polling place.
This election, Ghazi Edwin will be voting on issues of reproductive freedom, the economy, and student loan debt.
“Honestly, something that definitely affects me,” she said of student loan debt.
Now, with Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president, Ghazi Edwin said she feels the importance of representation as an elected official, as a voter, and as an Asian American immigrant.
“People always say representation is important, and I have too. But I didn’t actually realize the truth of the statement until today,” Ghazi Edwin said. “Having an Asian American in the highest level of office does feel like empowerment and protection, because right now we’re playing a system and a game that has been run by people who don’t look like me.”