Immigrant surge helped boost GOP states’ population, and they may gain US House seats as a result
By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org
The millions of immigrants who have crossed the border with Mexico since 2020 could change the balance of political power in Congress — but in a way likely to boost Republican states that emphasize border security, at the expense of more welcoming Democratic states.
That’s because many of the new immigrants joined state-to-state movers gravitating to the fast-growing conservative strongholds of Florida and Texas, boosting those states’ populations. California and New York also had large influxes from the border but ended up losing population anyway.
The vastly different population changes threaten to scramble the Electoral College map.
California and other Democratic states lost immigration-related population gains when residents moved away during the COVID-19 pandemic or while seeking jobs and housing. Where did those state-to-state movers go? Florida and Texas, in large measure.
Republicans have long accused Democrats of encouraging immigration for their electoral benefit.
But the shift is likely to help Republican-leaning states in the next decade: The Constitution allocates congressional representation by population — including noncitizens. Every 10 years, the country counts its people and then shuffles the number of U.S. House seats given to each state.
In presidential elections, each state has the same number of electoral votes as it does congressional representatives.
Several experts contacted by Stateline agreed that after the next decennial census in 2030, California is likely to lose four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Texas is likely to gain four.
Adam Kincaid, president and executive director of the GOP-founded American Redistricting Project, said the changes could dramatically alter the Electoral College map, with the Midwest no longer a “blue wall” against Republican presidential victories if the region loses three seats, by his calculation.
On the plus side for Democrats, he said, immigration helped stem population losses in many blue states.
But it’s hard to predict the next five years, Kincaid said. Housing is expensive and hard to get in states such as California and New York, he noted, while also blaming Democratic “policies that drive where people want to live.”
“I don’t think anybody rationally expects Florida and Texas to grow as rapidly through the decade as they did during COVID,” Kincaid said. “We’ll all be wrong. These are only forecasts and things will change.”
House seats
Three forecasts for 2030 — one provided to Stateline by Jonathan Cervas, an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University; one from Kincaid’s American Redistricting Project; and one from William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution — all show Democratic states in the Northeast and West losing House seats while fast-growing, mostly Republican states in the South and West gain seats.
In addition to the representation changes in California and Texas, Florida would gain either three or four seats in the U.S. House, depending on the forecast, while Illinois and New York each would lose either one or two seats.
Other possible gains would go to Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Utah, depending on the forecast. Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin might lose seats.
The forecasts were developed from new census population estimates that attempt to show where millions of border migrants went since 2020, based on court records showing ZIP codes of residence.
Florida, Texas and California each got around a million immigrants, many from the border surge of 2022-2024. But California’s gain was offset by 1.7 million people moving away to other states, including Texas, while Florida and Texas gained from both immigration and state-to-state movers.
Similarly, New York gained 750,000 people from immigration but lost 1.1 million as New Yorkers moved out of state.
Party leaders are paying close attention to the details.
Republican states could gain more seats in the U.S. House after decennial redistricting in 2030, assuming heavily Republican states like Florida and Texas remain that way. More people are moving to those states, including immigrants and state-to-state movers from Democratic states.
The new census estimates show the lion’s share of new immigration since 2020 going to Florida, Texas, California, New York and New Jersey. Hundreds of thousands of migrants also went to other states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Georgia, North Carolina and Washington.
It’s likely that many of the migrants who landed in California and New York ended up moving to Texas and Florida, where there were more jobs and affordable housing available.
The largest single state-to-state migration flow between 2022 and 2024 — about 171,000 people — was from California to Texas, according to a Stateline analysis of a separate Census Bureau release. There was another large flow, of about 122,000 people, from New York to Florida.
The February state population estimates, delayed from their usual release in December by the government shutdown in October, also used court records to adjust immigration numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau located millions of asylum-seekers, parolees and other “humanitarian migrants” who entered the country between 2022 and 2024 based on the ZIP codes they provided to immigration courts.
That’s a change from 2024 estimates, when the Census Bureau added humanitarian migrants to the total but assumed they had gone to places with historically high immigration.
“That assumption was convenient but implausible,” said Jed Kolko, an economist and undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Biden administration.
But as it turned out, Kolko added, “The humanitarian migrants were more likely to come over the border and then settle in places anecdotally known for providing services, like New York City and Denver.”
The result of sharpening the picture with court records: Some states got more immigration added for 2020-24 (130,000 for New York, 32,000 for Colorado, 30,000 for Texas), and some had it subtracted (104,000 fewer for Florida, 70,000 for California, 39,000 for Michigan) in comparison with older estimates.
Five years and beyond
With border crossings from Mexico at their lowest level in 50 years in fiscal 2025, it’s hard to chart the next five years and predict 2030 population, which will ultimately decide House representation.
Adding to the uncertainty is the unprecedented nature of the stress on population since 2020: pandemic restrictions and dislocations, followed by large-scale immigration during a labor shortage, a clamping down at the border late in the Biden administration, and then President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan that was just ramping up in mid-2025.
Frey, the Brookings Institution demographer, agreed that “the second half of the decade could be wildly different from the first half,” noting that state-to-state moves and immigration both dropped off between 2024 and 2025. That diminishes both of the drivers of Southern state population growth.
“My guess is, if this continues, Texas and Florida would benefit less in Electoral College gains,” Frey said. If immigration remains sharply curtailed, Texas could gain only three seats and California could lose only three, he said.
The overall trend would still see fast-growing, mostly Republican states getting more congressional representation, Frey said. But with lower immigration, “the contrast in red-blue state reallocation is still there but not as sharp as before.”
State demographers in Florida and Texas say they’re uncertain about what kind of growth the states might see in the next five years.
Florida estimates its own population using electricity usage to gauge the number of new residents, which shows more recent growth in the past couple of years than the Census Bureau does, said Richard Doty, a research demographer with the state Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.
In the coming years, Florida growth could stall for various reasons, including higher housing prices and high insurance costs from recent storms.
“Florida is no longer the bargain it once was,” Doty said. “The cost of housing in particular is driving young people and retirees to other states.”
In Texas, the large drop in immigration between 2024 and 2025 — down almost 50% from about 355,000 to 167,000 — will curb future growth, said Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter.
“If we look at next year, I think we’re going to see immigration to the United States take a very significant decline, and then that’s obviously going to affect Texas because immigration is such a big part of our population change,” Potter said.
That will likely extend to legal immigrants, such as the tech workers on high-skill visas who have moved to Texas cities and suburbs, he said.
“There’s a tendency for potential immigrants, legal immigrants, to perhaps be a little more reticent now, given what seems to be happening in terms of immigration enforcement in the United States,” Potter said.
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
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