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.”
Host
Mark Krikorian is the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Guest
Steven Camarota is the Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Related
Press Release
Estimating the impact of legal and illegal immigration on apportionment and political influence in the U.S. House and Electoral College
How Non-Citizens Impact Political Representation and the Partisan Makeup of the U.S. House of Representatives
How Many Non-Citizens Would Have to Vote to Affect the 2024 Presidential Election?
Intro MontageVoices in the opening montage:
