Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff received significant boosts in their challenges to Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and David Perdue (R-GA) in Georgia’s runoff elections this month after the state’s foreign-born population ballooned over the last three decades.
Warnock, who beat Loeffler with 51 percent of the vote, won huge majority support from Georgia’s two largest immigrant populations — winning 64 percent of Hispanics and 60 percent of Asian Americans. In contrast, Loeffler won less than 4-in-10 Hispanics and about 40 percent of Asians.
Ossoff pulled off a similar feat, gaining support from 64 percent of Hispanics and nearly 6-in-10 Asians compared to Perdue’s 36 percent with Hispanics and 41 percent with Asians.
According to the New York Times, the Democrat wins are “fueled by the state’s changing demographics” that could “mean that Georgia has finally achieved battleground status,” for which the Democrat Party has long worked. Days before the election, Democrat activists gleefully cheered that the state had become their new California with a “trajectory of change.”
As much of the establishment media has acknowledged, much of the Democrats’ success in Georgia is due to the nation’s annual admission of 1.2 million legal immigrants a year who can eventually become naturalized citizens and sponsor foreign relatives for green cards. The process is known as “chain migration.”
Before President George H.W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, Georgia’s foreign-born population stood at about 2.7 percent of its total population with fewer than 200,000 foreign-born residents in the state.
Today, Georgia is home to nearly 1.1 million foreign-born residents who make up more than 10 percent of the state’s population — a 515 percent increase in three decades. Nearly 3-in-10 of these foreign-born residents are Asian and another almost 4-in-10 are Hispanic.
Most significantly for Democrats, though, is that in 1990, less than 40 percent of foreign-born residents in Georgia were naturalized citizens and thus eligible to vote if they were 18-years-old or older. Today, more than 45 percent, or about 480,000, of the state’s foreign-born residents are naturalized citizens and thus eligible to vote once they hit 18-years-old.
The number of foreign-born voters and their voting-age children in Georgia has boomed by 337 percent since 2000 while the native-born voting-age population in Georgia has increased just 22 percent over that same period.
As has occurred in Virginia, the booming of Georgia’s foreign-born population is making the state increasingly favorable to Democrats. President-Elect Joe Biden won the state by a slim margin of 0.2 percent against President Donald Trump, according to state election officials.
The establishment media has repeatedly noted the impact of immigration on the Democrats’ odds in congressional districts, swing states, and presidential elections.
In 2019, for example, an analysis by the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein revealed that congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average, a little more than 14 percent, have a 90 percent chance of being won by Democrats over Republicans.
“The single biggest threat to Republicans’ long-term viability is demographics,” Axios reporters Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote in 2019. “The numbers simply do not lie … there’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans.”
At current legal immigration levels, Georgia’s foreign-born population is set to continue expanding. By 2040, research by the Center for Immigration Studies states that the U.S. will have brought 15 million new foreign-born voters to the U.S. — eight million of which will have arrived through chain migration.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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