Thursday, October 31, 2024

How Non-Citizens Impact Political Representation and the Partisan Makeup of the U.S. House of Representatives

The 13 congressional districts with the highest share of non-citizens in 2022 have roughly the same combined population of voting-age U.S. citizens as the nine districts with the lowest non-citizen shares.

Thus, in these nine districts there are four fewer representatives for the same number of citizens.

4 But within states district populations should be roughly even.5 Yet, non-citizens caused significant distortions in 2022: TX 33rd, where 29 percent of adults are not citizens, has 208,000 fewer voting-age citizens than TX 21st, where 4 percent are not citizens.

In terms of drawing district lines within states, the Supreme Court ruled in Evenwel v. Abbott that states may draw House district lines by total population, but it did not indicate if this is required.

3 In 2022, the combined population of voting-age citizens in the 13 districts that have the highest share of non-citizens was 5.64 million, which is only 2.5 percent larger than the 5.5 million voting-age citizens in 2022 in the nine districts with the smallest shares of non-citizen adults.

5 In Wesberry v. Sanders, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that districts in the House of Representatives must be roughly equal in population.

In the 54 districts with the highest share of voting-age citizens there were six, including the Louisiana 4th, in 2022 where there was no major party opposition.

https://cis.org/Camarota/How-NonCitizens-Impact-Political-Representation-and-Partisan-Makeup-US-House 

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