Biden’s foreign spouse measures are not new voters

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson joined the chorus of critics.

“This is clear evidence of the Democrats’ plan to turn illegal immigrants into voters,” he wrote in a social media post. Johnson’s announcement was partly referring to his recent Donald Trump-driven focus on noncitizen voting rights – something he himself admits does not exist to any significant extent. But the statement is also an indication that his party supports the idea that Democrats are only luring immigrants to the United States to get more votes.

The reality of Biden’s executive action, officially announced on Tuesday, is much simpler. Yes, he almost certainly hopes it will improve his chances in November. But not because it will win him new voters.

That’s obviously true, because the executive action does not confer citizenship. Instead, as an administration fact sheet explains, it removes the requirement that illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens leave the country before they can apply for legal residency. That’s the emphasis the administration is putting on the measure: it would keep families together.

About half a million undocumented U.S. citizens are expected to be eligible for the program, which also requires at least 10 years of residency in the country. (Nearly two-thirds of the country’s undocumented population had lived in the United States that long, according to 2019 data from the Migration Policy Institute.) Once granted residency, immigrants could apply for citizenship five years later.

In other words, no new voters for 2024. But Biden’s re-election campaign is surely hoping that 500,000 spouses of undocumented immigrants will see new reasons to be enthusiastic about the president.

It should also be remembered that immigrants in general, and undocumented immigrants in particular, tend to live in large urban areas, that is, in places that usually already vote Democratic and/or are located in democratic states.

Curious about how those 500,000 illegal immigrants might be distributed, I looked at two data sets: the Pew Research Center’s estimated distribution of illegal immigrants by state and the Current Population Survey’s estimate of where married noncitizens lived. Both populations were roughly equally distributed. The nine states with the most married noncitizens were the same nine with the highest estimated number of illegal immigrants. Cumulatively, they were home to two-thirds of the country’s illegal population in 2019. (Because the executive order requires 10 years of residency, newcomers are ineligible—again, a blow to the “great displacement” theory.)

Applying this distribution to the total of 500,000 gives us a distribution that looks like the graph below. States are arranged horizontally in relation to their margin of victory in the 2020 presidential election and vertically in relation to the estimated share of the population affected.

An estimated two-thirds of those affected live in states that voted for Biden in 2020. Only 14 percent live in states that supported Donald Trump and are not Texas or Florida. Any increase in new citizens of this magnitude would not be eligible to vote until a federal election in 2030.

It remains a kind of political Occam’s Razor: What is the simplest reason Biden is introducing this change (one that, as Johnson suggested in his post, may not stand up to legal scrutiny)? Is it that Biden is scrambling to turn these people into voters in time for his re-election? Or is he hoping immigrant families — particularly Hispanic families, given the makeup of the immigrant population — will view him more favorably?

The answer seems obvious. Or – as a conspiracy theorist would say – a little to apparently.