Many
skeptics of immigration fear that it moves the country’s political center of
gravity leftward. This is usually in the context of immigrants voting
disproportionately for Democrats, which they do because of their greater
preference for left-of-center policies (as this exhaustive analysis of survey data shows).
Immigration also helps the Left
by exacerbating social problems (such as the lack of health insurance or
stagnating wages for less-skilled workers) that the Left then points to as the
rationale for more statism. ( I discussed that here .)
But perhaps the most immediate
political effect of immigration is on the apportionment of seats in the House
of Representatives (and, therefore, of electoral votes). States with a
disproportionate share of immigrants — most of them blue — have more political
power in Washington than they would otherwise have without immigration.
This matters because there’s a
fixed number of seats in the House of Representatives and thus a fixed number
of electoral votes. (The number of House seats was set by law in 1911.) After
each census, House seats and electoral votes are reshuffled among the states
based on which ones saw their populations grow and which didn’t.
Our study found that the
presence of all immigrants (naturalized citizens, legal residents, and illegal
aliens) and their U.S.-born minor children is responsible for a shift of 26
House seats. Twenty-four of those seats come from states that voted for
President Trump in 2016. Ohio will have three fewer seats than it would have
had without immigration; Michigan and Pennsylvania, two fewer seats each.
California will have 11 more seats than it would have had without immigration;
New York and Texas, four more each.
Some people misunderstood this to mean that 26 seats would be reallocated next year due to
immigration; I even got some panicked calls about it. But that is not the case.
Instead, this is the cumulative impact of decades of immigration,
not the change from the 2010 census.
Twenty-four House seats may not
sound like much until you realize that flipping just 21 seats would flip
control of the House in the current Congress.
If you narrow the target groups,
you get a smaller effect, but it’s still significant. Removing from the count
only the immigrants themselves shifts 18 seats; non-citizens shift eight seats.
Interestingly, the presence of illegal aliens redistributes only three seats,
meaning the political consequences of immigration are driven mainly by very
high legal numbers, not ineffective border
security.
The politically redistributive
effect of immigration is so notable because, unlike during past waves of
immigration, the majority of population growth comes from immigration. That
means Congress is essentially using immigration — which is, after all, just
another federal government program, rather than some natural force like the
weather — not only to engineer the future size of America’s population but, because immigrants are
inevitably concentrated in a handful of states, also to engineer its distribution . It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch
to describe the federal immigration program as a national-level analogue to
gerrymandering — while state legislators draw district lines around where
people already live to maximize political advantage, Congress is importing
people who will disproportionately settle within certain pre-existing state
lines, skewing the balance of political power.
The moral of the story is not
that immigrants shouldn’t be counted in the census — the Constitution requires
that representatives be apportioned based on “the whole Number of free
Persons.” Instead, Congress needs to consider the political consequences of
immigration in addition to its economic and social and other consequences.
The Democrats have been fairly
open about using immigration as a political strategy. When Barney Frank was
still in Congress, he openly acknowledged that mass immigration (again, most of
it legal) is a key part of Democrats’ strategy to gain political power. Likewise, Eliseo Medina , an official in the SEIU and the Democratic Socialists of
America, made the same point after Obama’s election, saying that immigration
“will solidify and expand the progressive coalition for the future.”
Democrats are consciously and
openly using the policy of admitting more than one million legal immigrants
every year to shift the political balance of power in their favor. What are
Republicans doing? Following the Stupid Party stereotype. The administration’s
immigration plan, overseen by Jared Kushner and expected to be released early
in the new year, will reportedly set in stone the legal immigration level of 1
million-plus each year, and thus continue the shift of political power toward
blue states.
Among the many benefits of a
more moderate level of legal immigration — say, a reduction of a quarter to a
third, as under the Raise Act, which the White House earlier endorsed — would
be to reduce the downstream political fallout of immigration.
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