Political strategist Ryan James Girdusky says California may have retained as many as 10 U.S. House seats it otherwise would have lost if illegal aliens hadn’t been counted in the census.
On a recent episode of his podcast, It’s a Numbers Game, Girdusky argued that the continued inclusion of illegal aliens in congressional apportionment calculations has unfairly rewarded blue states like California and Illinois with sustained political clout — and penalized red states like Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia.
“Since 1980, California has 10 extra congressional seats that they would have not had had it not been for illegal immigration,” Girdusky said, citing historical analyses on the effects of noncitizen inclusion in census population counts.
The U.S. Census, conducted every ten years, determines how the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are distributed among the states. Although the Constitution mandates a count of “persons,” it does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens — a point of increasing contention in modern American politics.
California has a foreign-born population of roughly eleven million, which includes an illegal alien population estimated to be 2 million illegal immigrants.
Legal ambiguity about who should be counted has long benefited the Golden State, Girdusky claims. He cited analysis and graphics from the Brennan Center indicating that tempered earlier predictions that California could hemorrhage five seats by the time of the 203o census: “The Brennan Center found that… instead of losing five, California was going to lose three.”
He also indicated that population shifts suggest that California should have lost seats in most of the last several censuses and that even when the state does lose a seat, as it did after the 2020 census, its losses are mitigated by immigration. He attributed the gap to an influx of undocumented immigrants offsetting the number of Americans moving out or dying.
“Immigration is padding the numbers for failed blue state governance,” Girdusky said, pointing to New York City’s population dynamics between 2023 and 2024. He claimed that despite a net loss of native residents, the city grew by over 87,000 people thanks to immigration, partially mitigating a likely loss of congressional representation.
While Girdusky acknowledged that red states like Florida and Texas are also growing due to immigration, he emphasized that many red states with lower immigration levels, such as Georgia and Tennessee, are being shortchanged.
“They should gain a House seat each,” he said, “but they’re probably not going to.”
Texas is a more complex case.
Despite being a red state, Texas benefits from both high immigration and high domestic migration, and is still expected to gain seats, though fewer than it might under a citizen-only count. According to Girdusky, Texas would have lost one seat in 1990 and 2020 under such a model, but will likely gain four instead due to overall population growth.
Joining the podcast, RJ Hauman, president of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement, supported Girdusky’s claims and framed the issue as a constitutional crisis.
“Right now, we’re handing that power to people who ain’t even supposed to be here,” Hauman said. “They’re making communities unsafe. They’re corrupting our system. And at the same time, we’re telling the American voter their vote means less. That’s not democracy… that’s distortion.”
Hauman criticized the Biden administration for reversing former President Donald Trump’s 2020 executive order to exclude illegal aliens from apportionment counts. That order had been the subject of intense litigation at the end of Trump’s first term but was ultimately upheld by the United States Supreme Court on procedural grounds.
The legality of Trump’s directive remained uncertain on the merits, and it was expected to face further court challenges. Ultimately, the policy was rescinded shortly after then-President Biden took office, reinstating the historical approach of counting all residents, regardless of citizenship status.
Critics, including Dale Ho, the attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that excluding noncitizens would violate the Constitution’s requirement to count the “whole number of persons in each State.”
“The Constitution requires that everyone in the U.S. be counted in the census. President Trump can’t pick and choose,” Ho said before referring to an earlier case. “He tried to add a citizenship question to the census and lost in the Supreme Court.”
However, Girdusky and Hauman argue that failing to address the issue now will perpetuate distorted representation for decades to come.
Hauman also mentioned proposed legislation in Congress, including the Equal Representation Act, which would add a citizenship question to the census and apportion congressional seats based only on the citizen population.
“Representation… that’s power,” Hauman said.