Washington, D.C. (October 31, 2024) - Immigration shifts political power in the United States – without a single immigrant having to vote.

Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and thus votes in the Electoral College are apportioned among the states based on each one’s total population — not by the number of citizens or legal residents. The Center for Immigration Studies today released two reports explaining how this works, which are the subject of this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy.

The first report examines how the enormous scale of legal and illegal immigration in recent decades has redistributed House seats and electoral votes to high-immigration states, which provides a net benefit to Democrats.

The second report looks at congressional districts, and shows how immigration redistributes representation from districts comprised primarily of U.S. citizens to districts with large non-citizen populations. This too has a significant partisan dimension, but it has nothing to do with non-citizens possibly voting illegally.

“Because of the way reapportionment and redistricting work, immigration, including illegal immigration, redistributes political power in Washington,” said Steven Camarota, the Center’s Director of Research and lead author of both reports. He added, “This redistribution is directly proportional to the scale of legal and illegal immigration and exists independent of whether or how immigrants themselves vote.”

Among the findings of the apportionment study:

• Immigrants (legal and illegal) in the 2020 census shifted 17 House seats (and thus also 17 votes in the Electoral College). This estimate represents the cumulative impact of immigration, not just the change since the last census.
• This situation in 2020 created a net gain of 14 seats (and electoral votes) for Democratic-leaning states due to the presence of immigrants in the census, while Republican states had 10 fewer seats and battleground states four fewer.
• If the total legal and illegal immigrant population continues to grow at the current rapid pace, immigrants would redistribute approximately 22 seats in the 2030 census.
• Non-citizens (legal and illegal) redistributed 6 seats in 2020 and by 2030 that will grow to 10 seats.
• Illegal immigrants captured in the 2020 census redistributed two seats. If the illegal immigrant population continues to grow at the current pace, it will redistribute 7 seats by 2030.

Among the findings of the redistricting study:

• The 13 congressional districts with the highest share of non-citizens in 2022 have roughly the same combined population of voting-age U.S. citizens as the nine districts with the lowest non-citizen shares. Thus, these nine districts have four fewer representatives for the same number of citizens.
• The population of districts can differ partly because of the way U.S. House seats are apportioned among the states, because each state must have at least one House member, regardless of its population. But within states district populations should be roughly even. Yet, non-citizens caused significant distortions in 2022:
  • The TX 33rd, where 29 percent of adults are not citizens, has 208,000 fewer voting-age citizens than the 21st district, where 4 percent are not citizens.
  • The NY 6th, where 27 percent of adults are not citizens, has 169,000 fewer voting-age citizens than the 21st district, where 2 percent are not citizens.
  • The CA 34th, where 30 percent of adults are not citizens, has 162,000 fewer adult citizens than the 3rd district, where 5 percent are not citizens.
• Not surprisingly, districts with large non-citizen populations have relatively fewer voters. In 2022, the winning candidate received about 73 percent more votes in the 54 districts where less than 2 percent of adults are non-citizens than in the 24 districts where one in five adults is a non-citizen.
• Districts where non-citizens comprise a large share of the population tend to vote Democratic, while high-citizenship districts tend to vote Republican. Of the 24 districts where one in five adults is not an American citizen, 20 were won by a Democrat in 2022. In contrast, the Democrat won in just five of the 54 districts where 98 percent of adults are citizens.
• In 2022, each 1 percentage-point increase in the non-citizen share of a congressional district’s adult population is associated with a 1.8 percentage-point increase in the Democratic share of the two-party vote. This reflects the fact that voters who live around non-citizens tend to be Democrats. This is not evidence that non-citizens themselves are voting.

Camarota and podcast host Mark Krikorian also discussed an earlier post exploring “How Many Non-Citizens Would Have to Vote to Affect the 2024 Presidential Election?”