Immigrant Surge Helped Boost GOP States’ Population, and They May Gain U.S. House Seats as a Result

House Seats
Three forecasts for 2030 — one provided to Stateline by Jonathan Cervas, an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University; one from Kincaid’s American Redistricting Project; and one from William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution — all show Democratic states in the Northeast and West losing House seats while fast-growing, mostly Republican states in the South and West gain seats.

In addition to the representation changes in California and Texas, Florida would gain either three or four seats in the U.S. House, depending on the forecast, while Illinois and New York each would lose either one or two seats.

Other possible gains would go to Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Utah, depending on the forecast. Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin might lose seats.

The forecasts were developed from new census population estimates that attempt to show where millions of border migrants went since 2020, based on court records showing ZIP codes of residence.

Florida, Texas and California each got around a million immigrants, many from the border surge of 2022-2024. But California’s gain was offset by 1.7 million people moving away to other states, including Texas, while Florida and Texas gained from both immigration and state-to-state movers.

Similarly, New York gained 750,000 people from immigration but lost 1.1 million as New Yorkers moved out of state.

Party leaders are paying close attention to the details.

Republican states could gain more seats in the U.S. House after decennial redistricting in 2030, assuming heavily Republican states like Florida and Texas remain that way. More people are moving to those states, including immigrants and state-to-state movers from Democratic states.

The new census estimates show the lion’s share of new immigration since 2020 going to Florida, Texas, California, New York and New Jersey. Hundreds of thousands of migrants also went to other states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Georgia, North Carolina and Washington.

It’s likely that many of the migrants who landed in California and New York ended up moving to Texas and Florida, where there were more jobs and affordable housing available.

The largest single state-to-state migration flow between 2022 and 2024 — about 171,000 people — was from California to Texas, according to a Stateline analysis of a separate Census Bureau release. There was another large flow, of about 122,000 people, from New York to Florida.

The February state population estimates, delayed from their usual release in December by the government shutdown in October, also used court records to adjust immigration numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau located millions of asylum-seekers, parolees and other “humanitarian migrants” who entered the country between 2022 and 2024 based on the ZIP codes they provided to immigration courts.

That’s a change from 2024 estimates, when the Census Bureau added humanitarian migrants to the total but assumed they had gone to places with historically high immigration.

“That assumption was convenient but implausible,” said Jed Kolko, an economist and undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Biden administration.

But as it turned out, Kolko added, “The humanitarian migrants were more likely to come over the border and then settle in places anecdotally known for providing services, like New York City and Denver.”

The result of sharpening the picture with court records: Some states got more immigration added for 2020-24 (130,000 for New York, 32,000 for Colorado, 30,000 for Texas), and some had it subtracted (104,000 fewer for Florida, 70,000 for California, 39,000 for Michigan) in comparison with older estimates.

Five Years and Beyond
With border crossings from Mexico at their lowest level in 50 years in fiscal 2025, it’s hard to chart the next five years and predict 2030 population, which will ultimately decide House representation.

Adding to the uncertainty is the unprecedented nature of the stress on population since 2020: pandemic restrictions and dislocations, followed by large-scale immigration during a labor shortage, a clamping down at the border late in the Biden administration, and then President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan that was just ramping up in mid-2025.

Frey, the Brookings Institution demographer, agreed that “the second half of the decade could be wildly different from the first half,” noting that state-to-state moves and immigration both dropped off between 2024 and 2025. That diminishes both of the drivers of Southern state population growth.

“My guess is, if this continues, Texas and Florida would benefit less in Electoral College gains,” Frey said. If immigration remains sharply curtailed, Texas could gain only three seats and California could lose only three, he said.

The overall trend would still see fast-growing, mostly Republican states getting more congressional representation, Frey said. But with lower immigration, “the contrast in red-blue state reallocation is still there but not as sharp as before.”

State demographers in Florida and Texas say they’re uncertain about what kind of growth the states might see in the next five years.

Florida estimates its own population using electricity usage to gauge the number of new residents, which shows more recent growth in the past couple of years than the Census Bureau does, said Richard Doty, a research demographer with the state Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

In the coming years, Florida growth could stall for various reasons, including higher housing prices and high insurance costs from recent storms.

“Florida is no longer the bargain it once was,” Doty said. “The cost of housing in particular is driving young people and retirees to other states.”

In Texas, the large drop in immigration between 2024 and 2025 — down almost 50% from about 355,000 to 167,000 — will curb future growth, said Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter.

“If we look at next year, I think we’re going to see immigration to the United States take a very significant decline, and then that’s obviously going to affect Texas because immigration is such a big part of our population change,” Potter said.

That will likely extend to legal immigrants, such as the tech workers on high-skill visas who have moved to Texas cities and suburbs, he said.

“There’s a tendency for potential immigrants, legal immigrants, to perhaps be a little more reticent now, given what seems to be happening in terms of immigration enforcement in the United States,” Potter said.

Tim Henderson covers demographics for Stateline. The article originally appeared in Stateline. Stateline is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, with reporting from every capital. Stateline journalists aim to illuminate the big challenges and policy trends that cross state borders. You may subscribe to Stateline here.