When he was first speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, the comments by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) about asylum seekers who’d arrived in the U.S. didn’t attract a great deal of attention.
Democrats, Rubio argued, “have the power to immediately release [immigrants] and grant them asylum, which now puts them on a five-year path to citizenship, which is what a lot of Democrats want. They want to turn a bunch of illegal immigrants into voters, into citizens, into voters, in the hopes that those people will then turn around and vote for them in future elections, grateful because they will know who let them in.”
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As Tapper quickly noted, Rubio’s timeline is dubious. His political argument, meanwhile, mostly flew under the radar until Breitbart, which has long championed hard-right rhetoric on immigration, excerpted the comments as a stand-alone article. The Florida senator then shared the article with his social-media followers, offering a more pointed distillation of his argument.
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“Asylum is a pathway to citizenship,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Democrats want mass asylum because they need lots of new voters.”
There’s an important difference between what he said on CNN and what he said on social media, where the rewards for taking a more aggressively partisan/conspiratorial tack are greater. To Tapper, Rubio argued that the ability to quickly obtain a work permit or be granted asylum as a step to citizenship was a lure, one that Democrats purportedly encourage. On social media, it became a Democratic need for voters — and therefore an argument that the left is encouraging new immigrants willfully, if not systematically.
On X, in other words, it became a great-replacement-theory-adjacent argument, if not an explicit endorsement of the idea that nefarious actors are trying to subvert the will of native-born Americans.
As Rubio should certainly know, the conclusion that newly arrived immigrants will necessarily back the Democratic Party is dubious.
It is certainly true that there is a sentiment on the left that America’s increased diversity is a political asset. One of the arguments after Barack Obama was elected president was that he was a harbinger of the new American politics, an idea that was reinforced with Census Bureau projections showing that White Americans were poised to shift from a majority to a plurality by 2050.
But since Obama’s reelection in 2012, that theory has taken some hits. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, suggesting that this purported coalition wasn’t as affixed as had been suspected. Trump’s loss in 2020 came despite improvements among non-White voting groups. Since 2020, Black and Hispanic Americans have become much less strongly aligned with the Democratic Party, according to data from Gallup.
We can consider the question of how immigrants in particular vote by looking at data from the national General Social Survey. It includes questions on birthplace and party identification that lets us effectively break out the difference in party identity by nativity. Looking at responses from the last three surveys, we see that foreign-born respondents are no more likely to identify as Democrats than native-born Americans — but much less likely to identify as Republicans.
Instead, a plurality of foreign-born respondents identify as independents and not as Democrat-leaning independents. Just: independents.
Yes, those who identify as partisans are more likely to say they are Democrats. And, yes, states with higher foreign-born populations tend to vote more heavily Democratic. We can see that in the results from the 2020 presidential election.
Of course, a large percentage of those foreign-born residents of the United States aren’t citizens and so can’t vote. There’s also an ecological fallacy at play here: Immigrants tend to live in large cities where there are existing communities of other immigrants, and large cities tend to vote Democratic.
The most obvious detail to pick out of the graph above, though, is the position of Florida. Florida is a red state that reelected Republican Marco Rubio by a 16-point margin in 2022. (That’s the same Marco Rubio mentioned earlier, of course, the one who is himself the child of immigrants.) As I found when conducting research for a book, Florida’s demographics more closely mirror the projected future demographics of the country than any other state. And it does not consistently vote Democratic.
There’s a weird sort of fatalism to Rubio’s comments, too, as though the Republican Party couldn’t do anything to win over those new arrivals or their children. To date, Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants has had surprisingly little effect on his support among Hispanic voters, but the pattern of increasingly hostile racial rhetoric on the right — a reflection of the Republican base’s measurable racial insecurity — probably wouldn’t help his party win over those newly arrived citizens.
All of this assumes we’re granting Rubio the accuracy of his presentation of how easily asylum seekers could become voting citizens, which we should not do. Rubio presents a scenario to Tapper in which asylum seekers are simply given asylum, which would be a huge political risk for Democrats to take. The process of seeking asylum absent such generosity is years-long, including a wait of several years before even receiving a hearing.
If an asylum-seeker is granted asylum, they can then apply for a green card — that is, permanent resident status — a year later. Then, five years after that, they can apply for citizenship, a process that takes at least a year, depending on jurisdiction.
So that’s four-plus years until an asylum hearing. A year before the green card. Five years before applying for citizenship. At least a year after that. Assuming all of that is granted, we’re talking about 11 years. Even if you shave off the four years at the front end as Rubio theorizes, it’s seven years — seven years in which Democrats get hammered for granting blanket asylum without getting any new votes. Not a great political strategy.
There’s one last part of Rubio’s argument that is worth considering: his claim that Democrats “need lots of new voters.” Do they? Republicans have won more votes in presidential elections one time since 1988. Power in the Senate is evenly split because Republicans are advantaged by a number of less-populous rural states; Senate Democrats represent 34 percent more Americans than do Senate Republicans. Democrats are also competitive in the House and at the state level. As noted above, future trends do seem to favor the left, with younger Americans shifting right — but still leaning heavily left.
So why did Rubio elevate this argument — this less defensible, more toxic argument — on X? Because he’s a politician, with the need for attention that all politicians share. And his comment got it, despite the irony of his offering it as the Republican child of immigrants from a Republican, immigrant-heavy state.
Democrats, Rubio argued, “have the power to immediately release [immigrants] and grant them asylum, which now puts them on a five-year path to citizenship, which is what a lot of Democrats want. They want to turn a bunch of illegal immigrants into voters, into citizens, into voters, in the hopes that those people will then turn around and vote for them in future elections, grateful because they will know who let them in.”
Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
As Tapper quickly noted, Rubio’s timeline is dubious. His political argument, meanwhile, mostly flew under the radar until Breitbart, which has long championed hard-right rhetoric on immigration, excerpted the comments as a stand-alone article. The Florida senator then shared the article with his social-media followers, offering a more pointed distillation of his argument.
ADVERTISING
“Asylum is a pathway to citizenship,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Democrats want mass asylum because they need lots of new voters.”
There’s an important difference between what he said on CNN and what he said on social media, where the rewards for taking a more aggressively partisan/conspiratorial tack are greater. To Tapper, Rubio argued that the ability to quickly obtain a work permit or be granted asylum as a step to citizenship was a lure, one that Democrats purportedly encourage. On social media, it became a Democratic need for voters — and therefore an argument that the left is encouraging new immigrants willfully, if not systematically.
On X, in other words, it became a great-replacement-theory-adjacent argument, if not an explicit endorsement of the idea that nefarious actors are trying to subvert the will of native-born Americans.
As Rubio should certainly know, the conclusion that newly arrived immigrants will necessarily back the Democratic Party is dubious.
It is certainly true that there is a sentiment on the left that America’s increased diversity is a political asset. One of the arguments after Barack Obama was elected president was that he was a harbinger of the new American politics, an idea that was reinforced with Census Bureau projections showing that White Americans were poised to shift from a majority to a plurality by 2050.
But since Obama’s reelection in 2012, that theory has taken some hits. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, suggesting that this purported coalition wasn’t as affixed as had been suspected. Trump’s loss in 2020 came despite improvements among non-White voting groups. Since 2020, Black and Hispanic Americans have become much less strongly aligned with the Democratic Party, according to data from Gallup.
We can consider the question of how immigrants in particular vote by looking at data from the national General Social Survey. It includes questions on birthplace and party identification that lets us effectively break out the difference in party identity by nativity. Looking at responses from the last three surveys, we see that foreign-born respondents are no more likely to identify as Democrats than native-born Americans — but much less likely to identify as Republicans.
Instead, a plurality of foreign-born respondents identify as independents and not as Democrat-leaning independents. Just: independents.
Yes, those who identify as partisans are more likely to say they are Democrats. And, yes, states with higher foreign-born populations tend to vote more heavily Democratic. We can see that in the results from the 2020 presidential election.
Of course, a large percentage of those foreign-born residents of the United States aren’t citizens and so can’t vote. There’s also an ecological fallacy at play here: Immigrants tend to live in large cities where there are existing communities of other immigrants, and large cities tend to vote Democratic.
The most obvious detail to pick out of the graph above, though, is the position of Florida. Florida is a red state that reelected Republican Marco Rubio by a 16-point margin in 2022. (That’s the same Marco Rubio mentioned earlier, of course, the one who is himself the child of immigrants.) As I found when conducting research for a book, Florida’s demographics more closely mirror the projected future demographics of the country than any other state. And it does not consistently vote Democratic.
There’s a weird sort of fatalism to Rubio’s comments, too, as though the Republican Party couldn’t do anything to win over those new arrivals or their children. To date, Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants has had surprisingly little effect on his support among Hispanic voters, but the pattern of increasingly hostile racial rhetoric on the right — a reflection of the Republican base’s measurable racial insecurity — probably wouldn’t help his party win over those newly arrived citizens.
All of this assumes we’re granting Rubio the accuracy of his presentation of how easily asylum seekers could become voting citizens, which we should not do. Rubio presents a scenario to Tapper in which asylum seekers are simply given asylum, which would be a huge political risk for Democrats to take. The process of seeking asylum absent such generosity is years-long, including a wait of several years before even receiving a hearing.
If an asylum-seeker is granted asylum, they can then apply for a green card — that is, permanent resident status — a year later. Then, five years after that, they can apply for citizenship, a process that takes at least a year, depending on jurisdiction.
So that’s four-plus years until an asylum hearing. A year before the green card. Five years before applying for citizenship. At least a year after that. Assuming all of that is granted, we’re talking about 11 years. Even if you shave off the four years at the front end as Rubio theorizes, it’s seven years — seven years in which Democrats get hammered for granting blanket asylum without getting any new votes. Not a great political strategy.
There’s one last part of Rubio’s argument that is worth considering: his claim that Democrats “need lots of new voters.” Do they? Republicans have won more votes in presidential elections one time since 1988. Power in the Senate is evenly split because Republicans are advantaged by a number of less-populous rural states; Senate Democrats represent 34 percent more Americans than do Senate Republicans. Democrats are also competitive in the House and at the state level. As noted above, future trends do seem to favor the left, with younger Americans shifting right — but still leaning heavily left.
So why did Rubio elevate this argument — this less defensible, more toxic argument — on X? Because he’s a politician, with the need for attention that all politicians share. And his comment got it, despite the irony of his offering it as the Republican child of immigrants from a Republican, immigrant-heavy state.
