The SAVE America Act cannot save this electorate

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin recently promised to focus immigration enforcement on criminal aliens. At a National Governors Association forum with Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), Mullin also noted that the United States had naturalized nearly 900,000 immigrants during the previous 12 months.

That number should have set off alarms.

The SAVE America Act addresses a game of inches. An immigration moratorium addresses a game of miles.

Republicans are consumed with preventing noncitizens from voting illegally. That problem is real, but the much larger electoral transformation is occurring legally, as millions of immigrants become citizens and acquire the right to vote. The SAVE America Act addresses a game of inches. An immigration moratorium addresses a game of miles.

As I have argued before, an immigration moratorium would do more to shape the country’s political future than the SAVE America Act. The White House, however, has shown little interest in confronting legal immigration at that scale.

After Mullin cited the latest figure, I reviewed the Department of Homeland Security’s naturalization data by year, country of origin, and demographic trend. I have long examined the size and composition of America’s green-card flow, but naturalization is the point at which immigration becomes electoral power.

Naturalization is a lagging indicator. The Hart-Celler Act drove immigration sharply higher beginning in the 1970s, but naturalizations did not surge until the mid-1990s. Since 1996, the United States has naturalized roughly 21 million people. From 2015 through 2024 alone — excluding the nearly 900,000 Mullin cited for the latest year — the total was 7.9 million.

Outside the COVID disruption, annual naturalizations have climbed from roughly 500,000 to 700,000 toward a range of 750,000 to 900,000.

The historical contrast is striking. As recently as 1984, fewer than 200,000 immigrants became citizens. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the annual average remained in the low 100,000s.

Even after the great immigration wave of 1880 to 1920, annual naturalizations generally peaked between 100,000 and 200,000. The high points were 217,000 in 1919, 233,000 in 1928, and 224,000 in 1929.

During the 39 years from 1908 through 1946, the United States issued about 6.2 million naturalizations. During the 39 years from 1986 through 2024, it naturalized 24.1 million people — nearly four times as many.

The modern citizenship wave has therefore dwarfed the one that followed the great wave, and it has continued for three decades with no end in sight.

The top-line numbers tell only part of the story.

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Roughly 90% of immigrants during the great wave came from Europe. In 2024, by my estimate, only about 10% of the 818,000 people naturalized came from Europe or Canada.

Mexico supplied the largest single group, with 107,670 new citizens. Latin America as a whole accounted for roughly 348,000, or 43% of all naturalizations. That four-decade pattern has helped make Spanish a durable second language across large parts of the country.

India supplied 49,700 new citizens and China 29,200. Those flows have remained substantial for decades. The United States is not merely adding population. It is importing millions of people shaped by political systems, religious traditions, and social assumptions far removed from the country’s historic norms.

The same question applies to immigration from Muslim-majority countries. DHS does not report naturalization by religion, so no precise count exists. But tabulating immigrants from the 49 predominantly Muslim countries I have identified previously yields 119,170 naturalizations in 2024 — about 15% of the total — and roughly 1.15 million over the past decade.

The largest 2024 totals included 12,200 from Pakistan, 11,600 from Bangladesh, 8,100 from Iraq, 7,100 from Iran, 7,000 from Egypt, and 6,800 from Afghanistan.

These numbers have not necessarily crested. The central question is whether naturalization policy is producing citizens with a durable attachment to the Constitution, the nation, and the obligations contained in the oath of allegiance.

One imam in Sterling Heights, Michigan, recently boasted that concentrated Muslim voting in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan could swing a presidential election. He was describing the political power that large-scale naturalization fosters.

Many naturalized immigrants become patriotic Americans. But a country naturalizing close to 900,000 people each year cannot assume assimilation will occur automatically, especially when so many arrive from societies with different political values and weak traditions of constitutional government.

This is all legal! It is also why the Republican fixation on a relatively small number of unlawful noncitizen votes misses the larger question.

The figures do not include the long-term electoral effect of birthright citizenship among children born to illegal immigrants, temporary visa holders, and legal permanent residents.

Pew Research estimated that 240,000 babies were born in 2023 to families in which neither parent was a legal permanent resident. The Center for Immigration Studies estimated that 72,000 children were born to tourists, foreign students, and other visitors in 2016. A separate CIS analysis suggests that 225,000 to 250,000 children were born in 2023 to families with at least one legal permanent resident.

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Those estimates come from different years and categories and should not be treated as a precise annual total. They nevertheless show how mass immigration, combined with automatic birthright citizenship, extends the electoral consequences for generations.

Legal immigration is producing as many as 900,000 new voters each year through naturalization. Birthright citizenship may add hundreds of thousands more future voters annually. Even if Congress shut off immigration tomorrow, the naturalization wave already in the pipeline would continue for years.

Illegal voting can decide a close election and should be prevented. But the scale of legal electoral change produced by immigration dwarfs the problem the SAVE America Act is designed to solve.

Any politician who campaigns on the SAVE America Act while refusing to support an immigration moratorium is missing the forest for the trees.

The SAVE America Act addresses a game of inches. An immigration moratorium addresses a game of miles.