Contrary to What You Might Expect, There Were Higher Rates of Naturalization Denials Under Biden than Trump

One might expect that the Trump administration naturalized fewer aliens than the Biden administration, on average, and had a higher percentage of denials, given the assumption that new citizens are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.

A review of six years of naturalization statistics shows that one of those assumptions is correct and one of them is not.

During the Trump years there were, in fact, fewer naturalizations on average than the Biden years, but the denial rates were higher in the Biden years. There is a possible explanation for this seeming anomaly, but first the numbers.

In FY’s 2017-2020, the Trump years, the average number of citizenship grants per year was 735,254, compared to an average of 891,162 per year in FYs 2021 and 2022 when Biden was in charge, a substantial increase, as one might expect. The number of approvals for these six fiscal years follow:

• 2017: 707,265
• 2018: 761,901
• 2019: 843,593
• 2020: 628,254
• 2021: 813,861
• 2022: 969,380

But when denial percentages for the same years are compared, we have a different picture: In fact, the total number of denials in FY 2022 was 111,637, the first time since 2009 that the number exceeded 100,000. During the Trump years the denial rates, as a percentage of the total number of applications, averaged 10.39 percent. In contrast, the average denial rate in the two Biden years was 12.53 percent.

What is going on here? My sense is that while trying, successfully, to reach larger numbers of potential citizens (and voters), the Biden administration also brought into the system a larger population of applicants, including a larger proportion of ineligible ones.

Hence the larger absolute number of new citizens and the increasing percentage of denials, a seemingly unlikely combination.