National Review, November 1, 2024
In the future, immigrants who become naturalized citizens may alter the American electorate, but all immigrants shift political power in the U.S. right now, even without voting. That’s the takeaway from two new reports by Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler of the Center for Immigration Studies.
The mechanisms of this shift are apportionment and redistricting. Representatives in Congress are apportioned among the states according to their total populations, not their total number of U.S. citizens. That means that the approximately 20 million noncitizens in the census — legal and illegal, temporary and permanent — bolster the congressional representation of high-immigration states without actually increasing the number of eligible voters in those states.
Specifically, California has three more congressional seats (and electoral votes) than it would if noncitizens did not count toward apportionment, while New Jersey, New York, and Texas each have one extra. All six of these seats come at the expense of red or purple states, leading to a net partisan impact that favors Democrats. (The number of affected seats is expected to rise to ten after the 2030 census.)
A similar phenomenon occurs within states because redistricting, like apportionment, is based on total population. Voters who live in high-noncitizen areas of a state receive more representation than voters who live in low-noncitizen areas of the same state. This, too, benefits Democrats for reasons explained below.
Imagine a small state with two representatives in Congress. The state is regionally divided with one representative in the conservative western portion of the state, while the other representative is based in the progressive east. The eastern progressives implement various local policies that immigrants find attractive — generous welfare benefits, high-density housing, refusal to cooperate with ICE, etc. As a result, when a large wave of immigration hits the state, almost all of the noncitizen newcomers settle in the east.
Let’s say the noncitizens increase the state’s population by 50 percent, resulting in the state receiving a third representative. Since congressional districts are drawn based on total population, the east gets two seats, while the West still has one. Progressive citizens have now doubled their representation in Congress relative to conservative citizens, even though the state’s total citizen population has not changed.
We can tell different versions of the same story. For example, maybe political sorting occurs after the immigration wave. A locality could be initially split between conservatives and progressives, but as immigration to that locality increases for nonpolitical reasons, conservatives who prefer a more traditional community move away, while progressives attracted to multiculturalism move in. The end result is the same — progressive voters enjoy more representation due to the presence of noncitizens around them.
Reality is messier than that illustration, of course, but Camarota and Zeigler do show a strong positive correlation between a district’s share of noncitizens and its support for the Democratic Party. In the 24 districts that are at least 20 percent noncitizen, Republicans won just four in 2022. Meanwhile, in the 54 districts that are less than 2 percent noncitizen, Republicans won all but five.
To avoid the political distortions caused by immigration, we could try to exclude noncitizens from population counts, although there are legal and statistical hurdles to that reform. Another solution is simply to reduce immigration. Under a low-immigration system, structural effects on representation would largely dissipate. With mass immigration of the kind the U.S. has been experiencing, however, the distortions are all too apparent.