The American Immigration Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization. Political campaigns cannot afford to overlook immigrants. A new analysis of 284 congressional districts in the United States finds that naturalized citizens hold substantial political and economic clout, with an estimated 16 million registered immigrant voters in those districts alone.
The number of eligible immigrant voters is even larger: 22.5 million people, including those who are eligible but not registered. That represents nearly half of the 46 million naturalized citizens living in the United States. Even in districts with moderate concentrations of naturalized citizen voters, eligible immigrant voters can have a meaningful impact on elections.
In Florida’s 25th Congressional District, situated in the Broward County area north of Miami, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat, flipped a long-held Republican seat by just 23,900 votes in 2022 and held it in 2024 by a margin of 30,700 votes. These may seem like hefty margins in a district that turned out 343,000 voters in 2024, until one considers that there are an estimated 135,500 naturalized citizens registered to vote in the district. In other words, there were more than four times as many registered immigrant voters as there were deciding votes.
Immigrant voters have earned their right to representation. As the Council’s analyses consistently show, immigrant households pay billions of dollars each year in local, state, and federal taxes, supporting schools, roads, Medicare, and much more.
In 2024, immigrants in the 284 districts analyzed paid $436 billion in federal taxes and a combined $229 billion in state and local taxes. They had $1.6 trillion in remaining spending power, income spent largely on groceries, rent, household goods, and entertainment in the United States. As individuals, immigrants are as invested as any other American in the issues that shape their families’ lives, such as affordability. Taken together, immigrants who have become naturalized citizens constitute a formidable force at the ballot box.
In fact, in 44% of the districts the Council analyzed (126 of the 284), the number of eligible immigrant voters exceeded the margin of victory in the 2024 election for their congressional representative. A geographically diverse sample includes:
Even when they’re not voting, immigrants shape a region’s political clout because they are counted in the U.S. Census. For example, a good share of Florida’s recent population growth is due to immigrants, and that growth earned the state an additional seat in the U.S. House of Representatives following the 2020 census. As drawn, Florida’s new 28th Congressional District, which encompasses the state’s southern tip, is home to 407,500 immigrants, who make up 51.5% of the population. After the redistricting, Republican Rep. Carlos A. Giménez won the seat by 27 and 29 percentage points, respectively, in 2022 and 2024.
This district is among the five districts with the highest concentration of immigrants nationwide, all of which are in coastal districts in Florida, New York, or California.
The Council’s Map the Impact includes data for immigrants and the U.S.-born in 284 congressional districts not just on voting, but on the factors that affect how people vote: age, educational level, participation in the labor force, jobs, and languages. Immigrants account for nearly one out of every five residents, on average, across all these districts. Understanding who they are is critical for anyone who wants to win the votes of eligible immigrant voters.
For example, on average, 83.1% of immigrants in the districts analyzed speak a language other than English at home. Campaigns that rely solely on English-language outreach risk missing not only eligible immigrant voters but also mixed-status and bilingual households that include U.S.-born voters.
Immigrants are crucial to the health and vitality of the American economy. In every district analyzed, immigrants are more likely than the U.S.-born population to be of working age — between ages 25 and 64 — meaning they’re more likely to participate in the labor force. Immigrant workers play an outsized role in construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and service industries, sectors upon which many districts, and particularly swing districts, depend. Their representatives — and those campaigning for a seat — would be wise to understand just who the immigrants in their district are and to remember that many of them vote.
Editor’s note: The remaining 151 districts out of the total 435 districts lacked a large enough sample size for the immigrant population to be included in the estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau from the American Community Survey, the source of this analysis.
