The increase in immigration has helped increase the population of GOP states, and they could gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives as a result

Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, is occupied by the Texas National Guard in February 2025. Republican states that value border security may benefit from increases in immigration since 2020, as larger populations translate into political power. (Photo by Eli Hartman for The Texas Tribune)

The millions of immigrants who have crossed the border with Mexico since 2020 could shift the balance of political power in Congress — but in a way that is likely to boost Republican states that value border security, at the expense of more Democratic states that are more welcoming to them.

That’s because many of the fresh immigrants joined the rapidly growing conservative strongholds of Florida and Texas, increasing those states’ populations. California and New York also saw vast immigration from the border but still suffered population losses.

The wildly disparate population changes threaten to upset the Electoral College map.

California and other Democratic states lost immigration-related population gains as residents moved away during the COVID-19 pandemic or in search of jobs and housing. Where did these movers go from state to state? Florida and Texas at vast.

Republicans have long accused Democrats of promoting immigration for electoral reasons.

But the shift is likely to assist Republican-leaning states in the next decade: The Constitution distributes congressional representation among the population — including noncitizens. Every ten years, the country counts its population and then shuffles the number of U.S. House seats allocated to each state.

In presidential elections, each state has the same number of electoral votes as members of Congress.

Several experts contacted by Stateline agreed that California will likely lose four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives after the next decennial census in 2030. Texas will likely win four.

Adam Kincaid, president and executive director of the GOP-founded American Redistricting Project, said the changes could dramatically alter the Electoral College map because, by his calculation, the Midwest would no longer be a “blue wall” against Republican presidential victories if the region lost three seats.

On the positive side for Democrats, he said, immigration has helped stem population loss in many blue states.

But it’s difficult to predict the next five years, Kincaid said. Housing is pricey and difficult to come by in states like California and New York, he noted, but also blamed “Democratic policies that determine where people want to live.”

“I don’t think anyone reasonably expects Florida and Texas to grow as quickly over the decade as they did during COVID-19,” Kincaid said. “We will all be wrong. These are just predictions and things will change.”

House seats

Three predictions for 2030 — one provided to Stateline by Jonathan Cervas, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University; one from Kincaid’s American Redistricting Project; and one by William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution — all show Democratic states in the Northeast and West losing House seats while fast-growing, predominantly Republican states in the South and West are gaining 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 would lose one or two seats each.

Depending on the forecast, other possible increases would include Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Utah. Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin could lose seats.

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The projections were developed based on fresh census estimates intended to show where millions of border migrants have gone since 2020, based on court records that show their home ZIP codes.

Florida, Texas and California each received about a million immigrants, many of them as part of the border surge from 2022 to 2024. However, California’s gain was offset by the outflow of 1.7 million people to other states, including Texas, while Florida and Texas benefited from both immigration and state-to-state moves.

Similarly, New York gained 750,000 people through immigration but lost 1.1 million as New Yorkers left the state.

Party leaders pay close attention to the details.

Republican states could gain more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives after a decade of redistricting in 2030, provided that heavily Republican states like Florida and Texas continue to do so. More and more people are moving to these states, including immigrants and resettlers from democratic states.

The fresh census estimates show that the lion’s share of fresh immigration since 2020 has gone 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 ended up in California and New York eventually moved to Texas and Florida, where there were more jobs and affordable housing.

The largest single state-to-state migration flow between 2022 and 2024 — about 171,000 people — was from California to Texas, according to a separate Census Bureau Stateline analysis release. There was another vast influx of about 122,000 people from New York to Florida.

The February state population estimates, which were delayed from their usual December release due to 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 using ZIP codes it 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 traveled to places with historically high immigration.

“This 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, “It was more likely that the humanitarian migrants came across the border and then settled in places supposedly known for providing services, such as New York City and Denver.”

The result of sharpening the picture using court filings: some states added more immigration (130,000 for New York, 32,000 for Colorado, 30,000 for Texas), and others subtracted it (104,000 less for Florida, 70,000 for California, 39,000 for Michigan) compared to older estimates for the 2020-2024 period.

Five years or more

With border crossings from Mexico lowest level in 50 years In fiscal year 2025, it is complex to plan for the next five years and predict the population size in 2030, which will ultimately determine representation in the House of Representatives.

Adding to the uncertainty is the unprecedented strain on the population since 2020: pandemic restrictions and dislocations, followed by large-scale immigration during a labor shortage, a crackdown at the border near the end of the Biden administration, and then President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan, which was not put into action until mid-2025.

Frey, the Brookings Institution demographer, agreed that “the second half of the decade could be completely different than the first,” noting that both state-to-state moves and immigration declined between 2024 and 2025. This weakens both drivers of southern population growth.

“I suspect if this continues, Texas and Florida would benefit less from the Electoral College gains,” Frey said. If immigration remains heavily restricted, Texas could gain just three seats and California could lose just three, he said.

The general trend would still be for fast-growing, predominantly Republican states to gain more representation in Congress, Frey said. But with lower immigration, “the contrast in the redistribution of red-blue states is still there, but not as stark as before.”

State demographers in Florida and Texas say they are unsure what kind of growth the states could see in the next five years.

Florida estimates its own population using electricity consumption to measure the number of fresh residents, which shows more recent growth in recent years than the Census Bureau, said Richard Doty, research demographer with the state Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

In the coming years, Florida’s growth could stall for a variety of reasons, including higher real estate prices and high insurance costs due to recent storms.

“Florida is no longer the bargain it once was,” Doty said. “Above all, housing costs are driving young people and pensioners to other federal states.”

In Texas, the acute decline in immigration between 2024 and 2025 — a nearly 50% drop from about 355,000 to 167,000 — will tardy future growth, said Lloyd Potter, Texas state demographer.

“As we look to next year, I think we’re going to see a very significant decline in immigration to the United States, and that will obviously impact Texas as well because immigration is such a large part of our population change,” Potter said.

This will likely extend to legal immigrants, such as tech workers on high-skill visas who have moved to Texas cities and suburbs, he said.

“There is a tendency that potential immigrants, legal immigrants, may be a little more cautious 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.