Previous CIS research has shown that immigration distorts both the apportionment of U.S. House seats among states and the drawing of U.S. House district lines within each state.¹Â This new report focuses on state legislatures. Using as examples the five states with the highest foreign-born shares — California, New Jersey, New York, Florida, and Maryland — the report shows that immigration causes state house districts to have dramatically different numbers of eligible voters.

The reason is that immigration has added to state populations about 25 million noncitizens — including legal permanent residents, guestworkers, foreign students, and illegal immigrants — but noncitizens by law cannot vote in state elections. Rather than draw lines to equalize the number of eligible voters in each legislative district, states instead equalize the total population in each district. Since noncitizens are not distributed uniformly throughout any state, some legislative districts have significantly more citizens — and, hence, more eligible voters — than other districts.

• The difference between the greatest and smallest numbers of citizens at the district level can be very large within the same state. As the first section of Table 1 indicates, California Assembly District 1 has one member representing a district with 396,704 adult citizens, while District 57 has a member representing just 248,324 adult citizens.
• The disparity is even larger for the Maryland House of Delegates. District 47B contains 15,244 adult citizens, which is only 40 percent as many as the 38,427 adult citizens in District 1B. {snip}
• These disparities give disproportionate representation to some voters simply because they live near more noncitizens than other voters do. The middle section of Table 1 shows that, for the example of New York, there are 11.6 members of the State Assembly for every million adult citizens who live in districts that have noncitizen shares greater than the median district in the state. By contrast, there are only 9.8 members per million adult citizens who live in districts with foreign-born shares below the New York median.
• Although greater representation for voters who live in high-noncitizen areas is unfair regardless of partisan implications, the distortion clearly benefits the Democratic party. {snip} As an example, for every one percentage-point increase in the noncitizen share of a California State Assembly district, the share voting Democratic in the district rises by an average of 1.42 percentage points. Put simply, because noncitizens tend to congregate in Democratic-leaning areas, they redistribute political power from Republican voters to Democratic voters.

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