Elon Musk Overstates Partisan Impact of Illegal Immigration on House Apportionment
In claiming that illegal immigration benefits Democrats, entrepreneur Elon Musk vastly overstated its impact on the apportionment of House seats and Electoral College votes.
“The math, as I understand it, you can research this obviously very easily on the internet, it’s pretty straightforward to research this, but my understanding is that the Democrats would lose approximately 20 seats in the House if illegals were not counted in the census and that’s also 20 less electoral votes for president,” Musk said in an interview with journalist Don Lemon on March 19. “So illegals absolutely do affect who controls the House and who controls the presidency. It does not affect the Senate.”
That’s inaccurate.
In December 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates lower immigration, released an analysis of the impact of legal and illegal immigration on the apportionment of seats in the U.S. House in 2020.
Looking only at immigrants in the country illegally — the yardstick Musk employed — CIS estimated they were responsible for the redistribution of three seats in 2020. Looking at it in partisan terms, two states with a Republican-controlled legislature and a Republican governor (Alabama and Ohio) and one state with a divided legislature and a Democratic governor (Minnesota) each had one fewer House seat in 2020 due to the inclusion of immigrants living in the country illegally in population counts. Gaining one extra seat were two blue states (New York and California) and one red state (Texas). In other words, the estimated net impact was that one Democratic state picked up a seat from a Republican state.
And, since electoral votes are apportioned based on the
