“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver talked to fellow late-night comedian Stephen Colbert Monday about voting for the first time as a U.S. citizen and revealed he got choked up in the voting booth.
“Honestly, it was amazing,” Oliver told his fellow “Daily Show” alum. “As an immigrant who had just got his citizenship in December of last year, I was waiting for that to feel real. When you worry about your immigration status all the time, even getting your passport still doesn’t feel real because you haven’t tested it against a system.”
Oliver moved to the U.S. from England in 2006, was approved for U.S. residency (a green card) in 2009 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen last December. The Emmy winner’s journey through the citizenship process has been a long one, but it has also provided him with plenty of comedic fodder.
“I tried engraving ‘Give me your tired, your poor and your aspiring comic performers’ into the base of the Statue of Liberty,” Oliver said in a 2009 interview. “But apparently that’s not legally binding.”
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