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.
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