Importing a New Electorate

"We often think about voters through the lens of race and ethnicity, but a growing part of the electorate are immigrants," says @pewresearch @mhugolopez. The number of U.S. voters who are immigrants has nearly doubled in last 20 yrs. By @SuzGamboa https://t.co/QNZkOT4OHs

— NBC Latino (@NBCLatino) February 27, 2020

Between 2000 to 2018, over 10 million adult immigrants have gained citizenship and become eligible to vote, raising the share of the foreign-born population that can vote to 49% in 2018, up from 38% in 2000. https://t.co/qBdLyVRsy4 pic.twitter.com/tHHuARqEqy

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) February 27, 2020

Immigration is remaking the political balance by adding millions of new voters who are voting Democratic by about 2 to 1. The president won immigrant-heavy Florida by only 100,000 votes. Every year we give out 1.1 million new green cards.https://t.co/4HzTgJIKam

— Center for Immigration Studies (@CIS_org) February 19, 2019

The reason numbers are by far the most important immigration issue is that all the effects of immigration stem directly from the scale of immigration -- cultural, political, social, economic, and fiscal. And the scale of contemporary immigration is truly enormous. The latest data indicate that there are about 45 million legal and illegal immigrants -- roughly 34 million of whom are legal. About 1.7 million new legal and illegal immigrants settle in the country each year. The total number of immigrants (legal and illegal) in the country has doubled since 1990, tripled since 1980, and quadrupled since 1970. As a share of the population, about one in seven U.S. residents is now a legal or illegal immigrant -- the highest percentage in 107 years. The Census Bureau projects the immigrant share will surpass the highest level ever in America history in eight years if we choose to continue current policy.

Pew Research has estimated that since 1965 (when the law was liberalized) immigration has added 72 million people to the U.S. population. That's post-1965 immigrants and their progeny. An analysis of the latest Census Bureau projections indicates that future immigration will add another 75 million by 2060. That means that future immigrants and their descendants will add a population the size of France in just four decades. There is no precedent for this in American history. [...]

They also sense that immigration is remaking the political balance by adding millions of new voters who are voting Democratic by about 2 to 1. The long-term political impact of legal immigration is very large. After all, the president won immigrant-heavy Florida by only about 100,000 votes. Every single year we give out 1.1 million new green cards -- which allow citizenship in 3 or 5 years.