IMMIGRATIONImmigrant Surge Helped Boost GOP States’ Population, and They May Gain U.S. House Seats as a Result
The millions of immigrants who have crossed the border with Mexico since 2020 could change the balance of political power in Congress — but in a way likely to boost Republican states that emphasize border security, at the expense of more welcoming Democratic states.
The millions of immigrants who have crossed the border with Mexico since 2020 could change the balance of political power in Congress — but in a way likely to boost Republican states that emphasize border security, at the expense of more welcoming Democratic states.
That’s because many of the new immigrants joined state-to-state movers gravitating to the fast-growing conservative strongholds of Florida and Texas, boosting those states’ populations. California and New York also had large influxes from the border but ended up losing population anyway.
The vastly different population changes threaten to scramble the Electoral College map.
California and other Democratic states lost immigration-related population gains when residents moved away during the COVID-19 pandemic or while seeking jobs and housing. Where did those state-to-state movers go? Florida and Texas, in large measure.
Republicans have long accused Democrats of encouraging immigration for their electoral benefit.
But the shift is likely to help Republican-leaning states in the next decade: The Constitution allocates congressional representation by population — including noncitizens. Every 10 years, the country counts its people and then shuffles the number of U.S. House seats given to each state.
In presidential elections, each state has the same number of electoral votes as it does congressional representatives.
Several experts contacted by Stateline agreed that after the next decennial census in 2030, California is likely to lose four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Texas is likely to gain four.
Adam Kincaid, president and executive director of the GOP-founded American Redistricting Project, said the changes could dramatically alter the Electoral College map, with the Midwest no longer a “blue wall” against Republican presidential victories if the region loses three seats, by his calculation.
On the plus side for Democrats, he said, immigration helped stem population losses in many blue states.
But it’s hard to predict the next five years, Kincaid said. Housing is expensive and hard to get in states such as California and New York, he noted, while also blaming Democratic “policies that drive where people want to live.”
“I don’t think anybody rationally expects Florida and Texas to grow as rapidly through the decade as they did during COVID,” Kincaid said. “We’ll all be wrong. These are only forecasts and things will change.”
