Apportionment & Immigration: 95 Percent of Noncitizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 – Cato Institute

2024/01/26 Leave a comment

Of interest:

In response to a question about restricting immigration, House Representative Yvette D. Clarke (D‑NY) recently stated, “I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.” When a Republican member of Congress askedwhether this was the motivation for other Democrats, including President Biden, to oppose more extreme asylum restrictions during a committee hearing at which I testifiedlast week, former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan stated:

I certainly believe it’s probably associated with the decision to overturn the Trump Census rule, so now [immigrants] will be mandated to be counted in the Census. When we reapportionate [sic] seats, it’s going to have an effect.

Although former President Trump did attempt to exclude some noncitizens from the Census count and from House apportionment, multiple courts foundthose efforts to be illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution is clear: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state.” But does this provision of the Constitution—whatever its merits—give Republicans a good reason to oppose immigration?

No, the data are equally clear: recent immigration trends are benefiting Republicans in states where they control the legislature and manage redistricting. About 62 percent of the three‐​million increase in the total immigrant population from March 2019 to March 2023 has occurred in GOP states, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

The American Community Survey (with a larger sample size but slightly older data) attributes 60 percent of the growth in the immigrant population to GOP states from July 2019 to July 2022. These percentages are also similar for the Latin American immigrant population growth.

What about noncitizens who might be excluded by a US citizen‐​only census? For them, an overwhelming 95 percent of the increase in the noncitizen population has been in GOP states from March 2019 to March 2023. Eliminating the growth in the noncitizen population from 2019 to 2023 would have cost Republican states 1.2 million people, or about two seats in Congress (the average congressional district has 760,367 people). Figure 1 shows the net increase in immigrant populations for states under GOP and Democratic control.

Table 1 shows the full data from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement for March 2023 and March 2019. The Republican state leading this trend is Texas, which netted 515,970 noncitizens and 833,028 immigrants overall. Other Republican states experiencing significant growth in their immigrant populations include Kentucky (130,061 noncitizens and 146,790 immigrants), South Carolina (102,096 and 157,396), and Florida (102,055 and 178,052). It is certainly likely that these states are attracting immigrants because of their strong job growth.

The argument that recent immigration is boosting Democratic representation in Congress is unsubstantiated. In 2015, I rebutted this same claim about recent illegal immigration. I noted, “Illegal immigration from 2000 to 2010 netted the Republicans about six seats in redistricting. Democrats managed only about 4.5, giving the Republican states yet again more than a seat advantage.” Clearly, immigration has not helped Democrats in terms of apportionment for decades. Yet, this misconception has become so entrenched that the former president tried to unconstitutionally exclude some noncitizens from the Census count.

I have also explained how it is false that Republicans fare poorly during periods when the immigrant share of the population is high. Republicans have controlled at least one chamber of Congress 85 percent of the years when the immigrant share of the population exceeded 10 percent, while not controlling either chamber 83 percent of all other years. This is a staggering disparity that has been completely overlooked in current political discourse. Republicans should not fear immigration based on unfounded political concerns.

Source: Apportionment & Immigration: 95 Percent of Noncitizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 – Cato Institute

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Trump gives away the game on his census citizenship gambit

2020/07/23 Leave a comment

Indeed:

The Supreme Court was confronted with a difficult question in the past year. The Trump administration wanted to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, and its stated reason was to enforce the Voting Rights Act. But opponents argued this was, in fact, a thinly veiled partisan gambit to draw more GOP-friendly districts.

The court issued a remarkable rebuke of the Trump administration’s stated reason. And now, the Trump administration is pretty much acknowledging its motivation was precisely what its critics claimed.

President Trump on Tuesday signed a memorandum stating that undocumented immigrants should not be included as part of the next process of apportionment — i.e., the doling out of congressional districts that follows every census. Such a move would reduce the representation of states (many of them blue) with higher undocumented populations.

Apportionment has never been handled like this, and there are major questions about both the legality and practicality of the memorandum.

The Constitution states that congressional districts must be drawn according to “the whole number of persons.” And federal courts have long ruled that congressional districts must be drawn according to total population. But there has been some ambiguity in how the Supreme Court has decided this question. And Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has indicatedthat perhaps states might be allowed to draw their legislative districts according to citizen voting-age population. At the least, the Trump administration is putting all of that to the test.

Beyond that, it’s not clear how this will be executed. Given that the Supreme Court struck down the citizenship question, how is the federal government to even determine which people are citizens? Even if the idea passes constitutional and legal muster, actually doing what the memorandum says is another matter entirely.

But those two very important questions aside, there’s the matter of what this says about the Trump administration’s true intent. The Supreme Court ruled in the past year that the Trump administration’s stated reason — the Voting Rights Act — “seems to have been contrived” and that officials such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross seemed to invent a justification for something they planned to do very early in the Trump presidency.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. strongly rebuked Ross and the administration, saying, “What was provided here [as a justification] was more of a distraction.”

Absent from the Trump administration’s legal defense was any indication that this was part of an effort geared toward apportionment or redistricting — the latter being the decennial drawing of new districts to reflect population shifts.

But it was part of the opposition’s case. Critics in the past year pointed to a previously unpublished 2015 presentation from the late GOP redistricting expert Tom Hofeller, which stated that using citizenship data in a state such as Texas “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” by diluting the influence of Democratic-leaning Hispanics. The critics argued that the Justice Department’s case for a census citizenship question closely mirrored Hofeller’s 2015 study, reinforcing the political motivations of the move.

And Trump himself seemed to affirm that aim. As the case was progressing, the president blurted out that, “Number one, you need it for Congress — you need it for Congress for districting.”

This ran afoul of the Supreme Court defense offered by the Trump administration, led by then-Solicitor General Noel Francisco. Francisco said at the time that Ross “did not rely on that rationale in his decisional memorandum.” Francisco added: “Instead, he relied on DOJ’s explanation … that citizenship data from the [American Community Survey] has substantial limitations.”

In other words, the defense was that we needed the citizenship question because the more-frequent but less-robust American Community Survey couldn’t provide totally accurate citizenship data — not because of a need for apportionment or redistricting data.

Both before and since then, the administration hasn’t done much of anything to reinforce its claimed desire to enforce or bolster the Voting Rights Act. But it has now confirmed that it would very much like to use citizenship data to award congressional districts — just as its critics claimed (and it denied) was its true aim.

Trump’s move Tuesday suggests his comments were more than just a coincidence — and that his administration’s disavowals of this alleged goal were dishonest, at best.

Source: Trump gives away the game on his census citizenship gambit

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