Study: Immigration cost Republican seats
Redistricting impacted by wave of new legal, illegal residents

© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

The heavy influx of immigrants cost the Republican Party nine House seats during the 2000 political redistricting process, according to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies.

One of those seats was lost as a result of illegal aliens being counted as part of the national population by the U.S. Census Bureau, the report's authors concluded.

The report, "Remaking the Political Landscape: The Impact of Illegal and Legal Immigration on Congressional Apportionment," was produced by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Dudley Poston, a Texas A&M sociology professor and author of the CIS report, examined how congressional seats would have been reapportioned if the Census Bureau had not counted naturalized American citizens, legal permanent residents, illegal aliens and those on long-term temporary visas.

Among the report's findings:

* The presence of illegal aliens in other states caused Indiana, Michigan, and Mississippi to each lose one seat in the House in 2000, while Montana failed to gain a seat it otherwise would have.

* Illegal immigration not only redistributes seats in the House, it has the same effect on presidential elections because the Electoral College is based on the size of congressional delegations.

* The presence of all non-citizens in the Census redistributed a total of nine seats. The term "non-citizens" includes illegal aliens, legal immigrants and temporary visitors, mainly foreign students and guest workers. In addition to the four states that lost a seat due to the presence of illegal aliens, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Utah each had one fewer seat than they otherwise would have.

* None of the states that lost a seat due to non-citizens is declining in population. The population of the four states that lost seats due to illegal immigration increased 1.6 million in the 1990s, while the population of the five states that lost seats because of other non-citizens grew by two million.

* Immigrant-induced reapportionment is different from reapportionment caused when natives relocate to other states. Immigration takes away representation from states composed almost entirely of U.S. citizens and results in the creation of new districts in states with large numbers of non-citizens.

* In the nine states that lost a seat due to the presence of non-citizens, only one in 50 residents is a non-citizen. In contrast, one in seven residents is a non-citizen in California, which picked up six of these seats. One in 10 residents is a non-citizen in New York, Texas and Florida, the states that gained the other three seats.

* The numbers are even larger in some districts -- 43 percent of the population in California's immigrant-heavy 31st district is made up of non-citizens, while in the 34th district, 38 percent are non-citizens. In Florida's 21st district, 28 percent of the population is non-citizen, and in New York's 12th district the number is 23 percent.

* The large number of non-citizens creates a tension with the principle of "one man, one vote" because it takes so few votes to win these immigrant-heavy districts. In 2002, it took almost 100,000 votes to win the typical congressional race in the four states that lost a seat due to illegal aliens, while it took fewer than 35,000 votes to win the 34th and 31st districts of California.

* Although the number of naturalizations increased in the 1990s, the number of non-citizens still increased dramatically to 18.5 million in 2000, up from 11.8 million in 1990 and seven million in 1980.