Brooks is a race and culture reporter for KCUR.
Cindy Phillips, originally from Mexico City, became a U.S. citizen in December and registered to vote the very same day. She said systemic corruption in Mexican politics, including the murders of candidates and voters, make it dangerous to participate in democracy there.
“This sounds very stereotypical, But there are cartels taking over the country, and the government is not taking the right measures to control that,” Phillips said.
Escaping that situation is part of why she immigrated to the U.S. almost eight years ago. The other reason was to be with the man who is now her husband. What she’s learned since about the electoral impacts of immigrants like herself makes her feel American democracy is more open and transparent than back in Mexico.
“I’ve read that younger voters have had a huge impact on the election results,” she said. “So in my case, as a millennial, if I vote, I know my vote is going to count.”
Philips, who’s 35, represents a rapidly growing sector of the American electorate: immigrants who are newly naturalized citizens.
An estimated 3.5 million voting age adults have been naturalized in the U.S. since the 2020 election, according to the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California San Diego and the National Partnership for New Americans. And the number of immigrants who are eligible to vote has increased by 93% since 2000, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center study.
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Though the same Pew study points out new citizens tend to vote less than American-born citizens by around 8%, the number of new naturalized citizens in some swing states has surpassed the voting margin of recent election results.
In Arizona, where the 2020 presidential election was decided by 10,000 votes, more than 62,000 people became naturalized citizens between 2016 and 2020.
Phillips said the significance those voters have energizes her as she prepares to cast her first vote in the U.S.
“Voting is a right that we have. It wasn’t too long ago they made this a constitutional amendment so women and other minorities were able to vote,” said Phillips, who has lived in Kearney, Missouri, since 2021.
“So it’s something we should remember,” she said. “This is a symbol of our freedom.”
The senior editor for Hallmark Cards has worked mostly from home since the COVID pandemic, and it is partly how she’s adjusted to living in rural Missouri.
She says anti-immigrant rhetoric she’s encountered in her small community has been a culture shock, compared to more diverse cities she previously lived in, like Independence and Olathe.
“They can make some racist comments that I don’t agree with most of the time. I don’t want to mention anything because I don’t want to get in trouble or get into some controversy,” Phillips said of living in Kearney. “I just got tired of trying to educate people when they don’t understand some of the aspects, to be different in this country.”
Phillips also worries that the lack of diversity in Kearney’s schools and businesses may negatively affect her 4-year-old daughter, who was born in Merriam, Kansas.
“I’m trying to teach her about other minorities by reading her some books and teaching her that everybody looks different,” she said.
She admitted it can feel defeating at times, but Phillips isn’t dissuaded from talking with other immigrants about the significance of voting.
“It’s our responsibility to exercise this right and to make it count for us, because we matter,” she said. “Now we’re citizens, so we need to teach younger generations that this is very important, and it’s essential for our country.”
Pushback to progress
Immigrant voting rights have again become a hot button issue this election season, and American Civil Liberties Union’s Kansas Chapter leader Micah Kubic thinks Americans need to modernize their thinking about what voter disenfranchisement looks like.
“It’s not all Bull Connor and police dogs,” he said, referring to the infamous segregationist commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, who ordered violent attacks against Martin Luther King Jr. and protesters in 1963. “Voter suppression is when we refuse to make materials available in languages other than English, when we know that it will boost voter turnout.”
Kubic also includes the fact that former President Donald Trump and others have since at least 2016 spread debunked theories about the number of noncitizens voting in American elections.
“The attacks that you see on democracy, especially these completely false, twisted ‘big lie’ attacks that tie immigration to it, are so, so harmful,” he said. “In addition to being factually wrong, they try to discourage people from participating by creating an environment of fear, harassment and intimidation.”
Still, Kubic said it’s common in his experience for the naturalized community to be politically active, since it takes an average of seven years to complete the citizenship process, depending on birth country.
“To do that you have to be super engaged. You have to be really aware of what’s going on in the world,” Kubic said. “And all of that leads, in general, to higher levels of civic engagement, including voting.”
According to a 2020 report from the National Partnership for New Americans, more than 5 million voting age immigrants became citizens between 2014 and 2020. And the Pew Research Center says 10%, or 23.2 million, of the eligible voters in the 2020 presidential election were naturalized citizens, a record high.
The path forward
In her suburban Kearney neighborhood, cut out of acres of fertile farmland, Phillips often reflects on the challenges of navigating the administrative pathway to citizenship.
She remembers living with the constant worry that sudden policy changes in Washington or Jefferson City or Topeka might make obtaining citizenship harder, or that simple legal issues like a traffic ticket could be considered crimes or a lack of moral standing by a court.
“Having that concern that at any given time they can just take your residency away because it’s subject to some conditions,” she said, “that was very stressful to me. So I wanted to do this for me, but mainly for my family, just to provide some security.”
Phillips is especially grateful for her legal status because she knows other immigrants may never get the opportunity to take the citizenship test, let alone pass it.
“It takes a lot of sacrifices and money and it’s a huge investment just to become an American citizen,” she said. “Once the ceremony was over, I felt very proud of myself.”
Phillips’ husband, who is a natural-born citizen, doesn’t share her passion for voting. She said he sometimes complains about issues like taxes and inflation, but doesn’t feel compelled to vote.
His attitude reinforces her ideas about Americans taking privileges like voting for granted. Still, it doesn’t affect her enthusiasm for making her voice heard.
“I just let it go because, I mean, you just pick your battles, right?” she said. “But I hope he votes in the upcoming elections.”
Phillips said she still doesn’t know who she’ll choose for president in November, but issues like education, health care and public safety will be top of mind when she goes to the polls.
“I’m excited because it will give me the opportunity to preserve the democracy of this country,” she said.
Cover Photo: Cindy Phillips stands by a shelf filled with family photos and Mexican-themed dolls she brings back to Kearney, Missouri, when she travels back to Mexico. “Its a daily reminder of my heritage for me and my daughter,” she said. (Lawrence Brooks IV/KCUR 89.3)
This article was first published on KCUR 89.3 and republished with permission.
