Immigrants don’t need to vote to influence elections

Steven Camarota writes for the New York Post about immigration’s impact on American elections.

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 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.

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