House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) was among those criticizing.
“This is clear evidence of the Democrats’ plan to turn illegal immigrants into voters,” Johnson said in a social media post. Johnson was partly attributing his announcement to Donald Trump’s recent focus on foreign voting, which he himself has denied is happening on a significant scale. But his comments also suggest the party supports the idea that it’s only attracting immigrants to the U.S. to get votes.
The substance of Biden’s executive order, which was formally announced on Tuesday, is much simpler: Biden certainly hopes it will improve his chances of winning the November election, but not because it will add new voters to his base.
This is obviously true because the executive order does not confer citizenship. Instead, as an Administration fact sheet explains, the order removes the requirement that illegal immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens leave the country before seeking legal residency. The Administration’s story about the order is that it keeps families together.
The program, which is expected to affect roughly 500,000 illegal immigrants in the US, also requires that immigrants have lived in the US for at least 10 years. (Nearly two-thirds of illegal immigrants in the US have lived in the country for that amount of time, according to 2019 data from the Migration Policy Institute.) Once granted residency, immigrants can apply for citizenship after five years.
In other words, there will be no new voters in 2024. But Biden’s reelection campaign is surely hoping that the 500,000 spouses of illegal immigrants will find reason for renewed enthusiasm for the president.
It’s also helpful to remember that immigrants in general, and illegal immigrants in particular, tend to live in metropolitan areas that already tend to vote Democratic and are located in Democratic states.
I was curious how the 500,000 illegal immigrants were distributed, so I looked at two pieces of data: the Pew Research Center’s estimated distribution of illegal immigrants by state, and the Current Population Survey’s estimate of married alien residence. The populations in each were roughly similarly distributed: the nine states with the highest estimated married alien populations were the same as the nine states with the highest estimated illegal immigrant populations. Cumulatively, these states were home to two-thirds of the country’s illegal immigrant population in 2019. (The executive order requires 10 years of residence, so recent arrivals aren’t included, which is itself an argument against the “great replacement” theory.)
Applying this distribution to a total of 500,000 people gives us the distribution shown in the graph below, with states arranged horizontally according to their share of the vote in the 2020 Presidential election, and vertically according to the estimated percentage of the population affected.
It’s estimated that about two-thirds of those affected live in states that voted for Biden in 2020. Just 14% live in states outside of Texas and Florida that supported Donald Trump. These new citizens would be eligible to vote for the first time in the 2030 federal election.
We are left with a kind of political Occam’s razor: What is the simplest reason for Biden to introduce this change (which, as Johnson suggested in his post, may not withstand legal scrutiny)? Is Biden desperate to convert these people into voters in time for his reelection? Or is he hoping that immigrant families, especially Hispanic families, will view him more favorably, given the makeup of the immigrant population?
The answer is obvious. Or, as conspiracy theorists say, a little Too clear.
