Washington, D.C. (October 6, 2025) – A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies reveals how counting noncitizens when drawing districts for state legislatures skews representation, giving disproportionate political power to voters who live in areas with large noncitizen (and thus non-voting) populations.
- The report looks at the five states with the highest foreign-born shares – California, New Jersey, New York, Florida, and Maryland – and shows that immigration causes state house districts to have dramatically different numbers of eligible voters.
- Although greater representation for voters who live in high-noncitizen areas is unfair regardless of partisan implications, the distortion clearly benefits the Democratic party. Because noncitizens tend to congregate in Democratic-leaning areas, they redistribute political power from Republican voters to Democratic voters.
- One example: California’s 1st State Assembly District has 396,704 eligible voters, while the 57th District has just 248,324. The former, in the far northern part of the state, is represented by a Republican, while the latter, in Los Angeles, is represented by a Democrat.
“To avoid these distortions, policymakers could try to exclude noncitizens from population counts and draw different district lines,” said Jason Richwine, resident scholar and author of the report. He continued: “That approach, however, faces many legal and statistical hurdles. Another solution would be to simply reduce immigration, both legal and illegal."
|
|
