Elon Musk's Zero-Fifths Clause
His case for why illegal immigration helps Democrats is surprisingly sophisticated. Also, factually incorrect and completely un-American.
Yesterday, Don Lemon released an interview with his now-former boss and/or media partner, Elon Musk. One clip in particular — in which Musk defends his claim that Democrats are importing immigrants for political gain — seems to have been very popular with MAGA, because they think their guy scored points on Lemon. (They’re not wrong. More on that later.)
In fact, if you were wondering whether Musk thinks the exchange was important, wonder no more:
Here’s what happened. First, Don Lemon asked a question about one of Elon’s right-wing tweets. “You claim that Democrats and Biden are opening the border to gain more votes, but undocumented immigrants cannot vote in Federal Elections, so how is that possible?”
Lemon probably expected Musk to say something wacky and obviously incorrect about how immigrants are voting. Instead, he made a much more complicated, political-science-y argument. Here’s the full quote.
If you look at the apportionment with and without illegals, I believe... there would be a net loss for blue states of approximately 20 seats in the House. This also applies to electing the president because the electoral college votes are also done by apportionment the same way that House seats are done…
My understanding is that Democrats would lose approximately 20 seats in the House if illegals were not counted in the census, and that's also 20 less electoral votes for President. So illegals absolutely do affect who controls the House and who controls the presidency."
Clearly, Don Lemon was not ready for this, because he mumbled something inaccurate about the Electoral College in response. (More on that later.)
It’s a shame, because Musk’s argument sounds much more cogent than the kind of thing that Trump would say, but is in fact every bit as dark - and just as eager to shred the Constitution, too. Musk is to political science what RFK Jr. is to virology. A lot of what he says sounds like he knows what he’s talking about - unless you know what you’re talking about.
But the guy controls one of the largest printing presses in history, so you’re going to hear this claim again. It’s worth breaking down exactly what he’s saying - and why it’s completely wrong.
What exactly is Musk - and the rest of the MAGA elite — claiming?
It involves the census and apportionment. Every ten years, when we do our Constitutionally mandated population count, we don’t measure state populations in voters or citizens or taxpayers. We count people.
That count is used to determine the number of Representatives each state gets in the House. If you have 10 percent of the population, you get 10 percent of the congresspeople. Each state also gets one electoral vote per congressperson (and one for each Senator), so the more reps you get, the bigger the role you play in picking the president.
Brief sidebar: the fact that Musk thinks Democrats use illegal immigration to tilt apportionment in their favor is a good indication of his media diet. This isn’t right-wing reply guy stuff. This is the kind of complex, under-the-hood stuff you pick up by hanging out with MAGA Elite - the kinds of people who clerk for Clarence Thomas, not the kinds who sell buttons at Trump Rallies. The Heritage Foundation might be one place he gets his information. Or The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant think tank (with, btw, a truly hideous logo. Who does their graphic design?) Or it might have been Tom Homan, the former ICE director who made a heel turn from respected conservative to full on Trump nut.
So now, with all that context, let me go through the reasons Musk - and his allies - are totally incorrect.
Musk Tells One Story. The Facts Tell Another.
Here’s the most obvious flaw in the argument, and it comes not from me, but from the libertarian Cato Institute: 95 Percent of Non-Citizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 . Musk’s entire argument, which he delivered with a great deal of confidence, hinges on the fact that blue states are getting a disproportionate share of undocumented immigrants, when it fact it’s the opposite - 19 in 20 immigrants (and the potential future apportionment benefits they might provide) are going to red states.
This actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. After all, it was the governors of Texas and Florida who have been banging the drum loudest about the migrant crisis. In fact, the governors of red states have spent millions of taxpayers dollars to send immigrants to blue states. You would think Elon Musk would be very upset about this. It seems to have escaped his attention.
Basically, the idea that under Biden, immigrants are moving to blue states is just plain wrong.
Using Undocumented Migrants to Attack Legal Immigration
So when Musk says, “without illegals, I believe there would be a net loss for blue states of approximately 20 seats in the House,” where is getting his numbers from?
I don’t know for sure (this is a free Substack, after all), but I think he’s confusing the total immigrant population with the undocumented population, which is ironic since he once fell into the former group. The Trump Administration actually tried (unconstitutionally) to remove undocumented people from apportionment. From a purely power-grabbing perspective, the results would have been… underwhelming. According to Pew, two red states (Texas and Florida) would have lost a seat, as would California. Two red states (Alabama and Ohio) would gain a seat, as would Minnesota.
So, when you put it all together, undocumented immigration has, in recent years, benefited red states politically, and before that it was basically an even split between red and blue. The idea that undocumented immigration helps Democrats in apportionment just doesn’t hold water.
(When it comes to congressional redistricting, it’s a little more complicated, partly because states have different rules for how they draw their districts. I think the biggest difference would be to dilute the size of of minority-majorities in certain minority-majority districts, but the overall split in Congress would be about the same.)
Which brings us to what Musk is really doing. He’s using the fear whipped up with talk of a “migrant invasion” or whatever they call it this week to build support for taking all immigrants out of the equation when it comes to apportionment and the electoral college. Which would, while hammering Florida and Texas, meaningfully shift the balance of power to red states. From the Kaiser Family Foundation:
Should Everybody Count in the Census? (History Time)
Okay, so we finally got to the root of this. Trump promises to be a dictator on day one, and order the military to crack down on protestors. But if that doesn’t work, other parts of the MAGA coalition have a more subtle, intellectual-sounding plan to shred the Constitution. And this is part of it. Change the way the census and apportionment are conducted, and the Republican Party picks up a handful of Electoral College votes, and also cements a structural advantage in the House to go along with its one in the Senate.
But I actually think this part of it could sound compelling to some voters. The argument would basically be, “Immigrants can’t vote and aren’t citizens. Why should they give California extra votes in the electoral college?”
The short answer is because the Constitution says so.
But why does the Constitution say so. There are no stone tablets decreeing that a republic can’t, as an organizing principle, exclude immigrants from political life. Why did our founders go the opposite direction?
For starters, it’s important to know that at the start of the United States, and for more than a century afterward, immigrants didn’t just count in the census. They voted. In fact, when George Washington was elected president, immigrants voted for him in every single state. Some states starting banning immigrants from voting in the early-ish 1800s, but at least one state - Arkansas - held out until 1927. In other words, every president until Herbert Hoover was elected with at least some immigrant votes.
And it’s not like our founders were wild about everyone voting. Most people who vote today - women, twenty year-olds, Black people, and those who don’t own land, just to name a few - couldn’t have voted in 1800. Yet it was taken for granted that immigrants could and would vote. Why?
Three reasons. One, it made sense: when the country’s new, everyone’s new to the country. Two, voting was tied to the idea of “taxation without representation.” Immigrants who paid taxes deserved, the idea went, to be represented. Third, voting was also tied to military service. Immigrants served in the military - it made sense that they could have a say in picking the commander in chief.
Today, green card holders can vote in a few places in the U.S., but only in local elections. No one’s suggesting that we bring back immigrant voting at scale, or in nationwide elections. But when Musk, the Heritage Foundation, and the rest of fancy MAGA act as though they’re being Real American for treating immigrants terribly, it’s the opposite. To exclude immigrants entirely from our national life is, quite literally, an un-American view.
Which brings us to apportionment. Our republic has always made a distinction between voters and people. At the start, that first group was fairly small. The second group was almost everybody. Children can’t vote and don’t pay any taxes; they count in apportionment. The same is true (although at smaller scale) for adults deemed unable to care for themselves. Even when women, free Black people, and non-property owners couldn’t vote, they all counted for apportionment purposes.
There are only two exceptions. First, for a long time, Indians were excluded if they weren’t taxed. The second exception is better known, and even more directly connected to America’s original sin: according to the original Constitution, enslaved Black people counted as three-fifths of a person. I don’t think anyone today argues that was a good or moral thing to do.
Yet what is truly remarkable is what is being argued. If Musk and the rest of MAGA had their way, than for the purposes of apportionment, an immigrant in 2025 would have less political agency than a slave in 1790.
When Musk says, “This is important,” before sharing that view, I’m inclined to agree.
Coda
In a strange way, Musk did show up Don Lemon in that clip. Elon wasn’t uninformed - he was misinformed - he had a very cogent argument that was not self-evidently false, even though it falls apart if you know stuff. I did Don Lemon’s CNN show a few times and he was always nice to me (even though he once mistook me for an intern). But I think this highlights a problem a lot of traditional interviewers are going to face these days: powerful people can be shockingly ignorant yet, in their own way, highly informed. I wish he’d been more prepared for that.