Members of the California National Guard stand watch in June in Los Angeles, scene of protests against immigration raids several weeks ago. Photo / AFP
Congress has not passed a single bill as unrelentingly hostile to immigrants as the recently approved Republican budget mega-bill in decades, if not a full century.
Simultaneously, the new GOP budget bill allocates a breathtaking US$170 billion to escalate United States President Donald Trump’s programme of militarised mass deportation aimed at undocumented immigrants and revokes access to much of America’s social safety net for broad categories of legal immigrants.
A new Bloomberg analysis of Census data helps explain why virtually all Congressional Republicans felt comfortable approving so many harsh measures targeting both legal and undocumented immigrants alike: Hardly any of them must fear a direct political backlash from those policies.
Even as the foreign-born share of the US population is approaching a record high, Congressional Republicans have remained almost entirely insulated from the change.
Fewer than one in six House Republicans represent districts where the share of foreign-born residents exceeds the national average, according to the analysis by my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Carolyn Silverman.
Likewise, just four of the 53 Republican Senators represent states where the share of foreign-born residents exceeds the national average.
Ironically, the Republican who may be most exposed to an immigrant backlash against these policies is Trump.
Although he cannot legally run again, the coalition he has built at the national level has come to rely on voters who are naturalised immigrants.
Republicans will need them in 2028 as demographic change continues to erode the more traditional pillars of their electoral base.
The non-partisan Pew Research Centre, in its widely respected Validated Voter analysis, recently found that Trump in the 2024 election improved his performance from 2020 much more among naturalised citizens than among native-born voters.
“When you look at all the major groups [of naturalised citizens], people who are college [educated] versus those who are not, men versus women, different racial and ethnic groups, the pattern you see is all of these groups moved more towards Trump in 2024,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Race and Ethnicity Research at Pew.
Overall, the US has experienced a historic growth in the foreign-born share of the population since the passage of the landmark 1965 immigration reform bill.
Since then, the foreign-born portion of the US population - which includes both legally present immigrants and those who are undocumented - has steadily increased from about 5% in 1960 to 14.3% in 2023, according to the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
That would put the foreign-born share of the population near the all-time highs of almost 15% in both 1890 and 1910, during the era of mass migration from Europe.
Yet the Republican congressional majorities are overwhelmingly built on the places least touched by that change.
In the House, 166 districts contain more residents born abroad than the national average. Republicans hold just 33 of those high-immigration districts, compared to 133 held by Democrats.
That means only 15% of the 220 House Republicans members represent larger-than-average immigrant communities.
By contrast, almost 62% of the 215 House Democrats represent seats with more foreign-born residents than the national average.
There are some exceptions. Three south Florida Republican Representatives with large constituencies of immigrants from Cuba and Central and South America rank among the House members with the largest share of foreign-born residents.
But congressional Republicans hold only five more of the remaining 100 House districts with the highest share of foreign-born residents.
The Senate presents a similar pattern. In the 20 states with the largest shares of foreign-born residents, Democrats hold 36 of the 40 Senate seats. (The four GOP Senators from Florida and Texas are the exceptions.)
In perfect symmetry, Republicans hold 36 of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states where foreign-born residents represent the smallest share of the population. (The only exceptions are Vermont, Maine, and Wisconsin.)
That alignment may help explain why the GOP faced so little internal dissension over a budget bill that not only funds the enormous escalation and militarisation of Trump’s mass deportation programme for undocumented immigrants but also slashes so many public benefits for many legal immigrants.
Apart from permanent residents with green cards, under the bill most other categories of legal immigrants - including refugees, asylum seekers, and survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking - will lose eligibility for such major safety net programmes as Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and food assistance.
The bill will deny the child tax credit to an estimated 2.66 million US citizen children who do not have at least one parent legally present in the country.
“It’s taking access to the basic health and nutrition supports that our country provides away from broad categories of lawfully present immigrants,” said Heidi Altman, vice-president of policy at the National Immigration Law Centre. “We are talking about devastating community destabilisation.”
Although few congressional Republicans represent places likely to feel that pain, it could threaten the national party’s 2024 gains among immigrant communities.
The Pew Validated Voters study concluded that Vice-President Kamala Harris beat Trump among naturalised US citizens (which it estimated comprised just under one-in-10 voters) by only a 51% to 47% margin.
That was a huge improvement for Trump from 2020, when he lost naturalised voters to Biden by 21 percentage points, Pew calculated.
Trump posted big gains among white, Hispanic and Asian naturalised citizens alike, while his advances among US-born voters compared to 2020 were much more modest (just 5% on net).
Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California, says Trump gained among immigrant citizens partly because Democrats underestimated how many would chafe at the torrent of undocumented arrivals during the Biden Administration who competed for resources and jobs.
Pastor says the GOP may be equally mistaken “that the frustration of older immigrants will hold even if you began launching these indiscriminate raids”.
Few Congressional Republicans face much exposure even if immigrant citizens recoil from their agenda.
But, as Trump’s 2024 win showed, those voters have become a crucial piece of the party’s national Electoral College strategy - particularly because the GOP’s core group of white voters without a university education have continued to decline as a share of the electorate.
Whatever happens in the Midterm Congressional elections, the full cost of the GOP’s hardline moves against the growing immigrant population won’t be tallied until voters pick a president again in 2028.
- Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a CNN analyst and previously worked for the Atlantic, the National Journal and the Los Angeles Times.