In an interview last year Elon Musk explained how illegal immigration benefits the Democrats.
“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 the interview. “So illegals absolutely do affect who controls the House and who controls the presidency. It does not affect the Senate.”
Left-wing media outlets pushed back on Musk’s comments almost immediately. In their rebuttal most of them stated his comments were “inaccurate” and “exaggerated.” The interesting part of their rebuttal was they never directly said he was “wrong.”
The reason they didn’t come out stronger against Elon’s statements is because he wasn’t wrong. He might have gotten the number of House seats wrong, but he wasn’t wrong about his point. The Democrats know that simple research shows that illegals do have a significant impact on congressional seats and Electoral College votes.
It’s significant because a state’s population directly affects the number of seats it holds in the U.S. House of Representatives through a process called apportionment. It’s significant because a state’s population is the primary factor in determining its number of electoral college votes. In other words, a state can lose electoral votes due to a stalled population growth. A simple internet search will show the list of states that recently lost electoral college votes due to population changes.
Many people don’t realize the US census has and still counts all residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status. It’s required by the 14th amendment’s “whole number of persons” provision.
Counting non-citizens unfairly benefits some states, and because of it many Republican leaders are calling for changes to the U.S. Census. These arguments are focused on excluding non-citizens and adding a citizenship question. These proposals are supported by President Trump and several Republican members of Congress.