Immigrants already tip scales of US elections without even voting

Immigrants don’t need to have the right to vote to affect elections in the United States — simply by being here, they can tip the scales.

The apportionment of House seats and votes in the Electoral College among the states is based on total population — not citizenship or legal status.

The Census Bureau is clear that naturalized citizens, as well as non-citizens such as green card holders, foreign students, guestworkers and illegal immigrants are captured in the census every 10 years.

Because the legal and illegal immigrant population is so large and unevenly distributed across the country, it causes some states to gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and Electoral College at the expense of others.

Equally important, immigration shifts political representation away from American citizens and toward states and districts with large non-citizen populations.

An investigation by the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that immigrants — legal and illegal — counted in the 2020 census shifted 17 seats in the House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College.

The big winner is California, which has 8 more seats than it would have without non-citizen immigrants.

The states that lose tend to be low-immigration states in the South and Midwest such as Ohio and Tennessee. The inclusion of non-citizens alone shifts six House seats, with half the increase going to California. Illegal immigration caused two seats to change hands.

This redistribution of political power has significant partisan implications, with Democratic-leaning states experiencing a net gain of 14 seats and electoral votes due to immigration, while Republican states had 10 fewer seats. Battlegrounds had four fewer seats.

Non-citizens alone accounted for five of the seats gained by Democratic states in the last Census.

Keep in mind that the border surge had not yet occurred when the 2020 Census was taken. If the total legal and illegal immigrant population continues to grow at the current rapid pace, immigrants in the 2030 Census will redistribute 22 seats and electoral votes, while illegal immigrants will redistribute seven seats.

The settlement of so many immigrants may change the political alignment of states in unpredictable ways — though it stands to reason that as immigrants settle in larger numbers in states such as New York and California, Democrats are likely to see greater gains.

The political distortions created by immigration are even more pronounced in congressional districts.

Each district in a state has roughly the same number of people. But they don’t have the same number of legal voters.

Yet in 2022, at the time of the last election, New York’s 6th district, in Queens (represented by Democrat Grace Meng), had 169,000 fewer voting-age citizens than in the 21st congressional district in upstate (represented by Republican Elise Stefanik).

There are many districts like this throughout the country.

Not surprisingly, it takes many more votes to win in districts comprised largely of citizens. In 2022, the winning candidate received 73% more votes in the 54 districts where less than 2% of adults are non-citizens than in the two dozen districts where one in five adults is not an American citizen.

This raises important questions about the principle of “one person, one vote.”

In effect, the votes of American citizens who live around non-citizens count much more than the votes of Americans who live in high-citizen areas.

High non-citizen districts tend to vote overwhelming Democratic. Of the 24 districts where one in five adults is not an American citizen, only four were won by a Republican in 2022. In contrast, in the 54 districts where less than 2% of adults are not citizens, just five are represented by a Democrat.

The redistribution is directly proportional to the scale of legal and illegal immigration and is independent of how immigrants themselves vote.

If we want to avoid the distortions immigration creates, we have to enforce our laws against illegal immigration. We also must think long and hard about whether the enormous scale of legal immigration makes sense.

Steven Camarota is director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.