The Great Replacement? As Americans Flee Blue Counties, Immigrants Move In

Earlier this week we reported on our findings about net domestic migration trends in the U.S. based on voting patterns in the 2020 elections. (See: “The Great Divorce: 3.7 Million Have Fled Counties That Voted For Biden.”)

But we realized there was a discrepancy in the numbers. For example, while more than 483,000 people have moved out of Los Angeles County since 2020, the county’s population only declined by 351,000. Over the past three years, more than 88,000 Americans left Harris County, Texas, yet its population actually increased by 104,000.

And, while we found that, overall, 3.7 million people moved out of Biden-voting counties since the 2020 elections, the population of these counties went down by less than 1.5 million.

Why the difference?

Were those who stayed behind particularly fertile and long-lived?

No. The difference is almost entirely from what the Census Bureau calls “net international migration.”

Census says this includes “the international migration of both U.S.-born and non-U.S.-born populations. Specifically, it includes: (a) the net international migration of the non-U.S. born, (b) the net migration of U.S. born to and from the United States, (c) the net migration between the United States and Puerto Rico, and (d) the net movement of the Armed Forces population between the United States and overseas.”

Overall, the country saw a net gain of 2,534,150 people from international migration from 2020 to 2023, Census data show. These are presumably what Census describes as “lawful permanent residents.” (A separate report shows that in 2021 and 2022, there were 1.8 million people who obtained lawful permanent resident status, and the average per year is close to 1 million. So that would easily account for the 2.5 million net immigrants.)

Where are they coming from? Census data show that 35% are from Central and South America, 37% from Asian countries (including 6% from China, and 12% from India), 8% from Africa, and less than 7% from Europe.

But it’s where they are going that’s interesting.

As we did with net domestic migration, we broke out net international migration numbers into counties that voted for Biden and those that voted for Trump.

What did we find?

Of the more than 2.5 million international migrants, more than 2 million went to counties that voted for Biden. Which means fewer than 500,000 of them ended up in counties that voted for Trump.

Here’s another way to look at it:

Of the 100 counties with the largest gains from net international migration since 2020, all but eight of them voted for Biden in 2020.

At the other end of the spectrum, of the 100 counties with the lowest levels of net international migration, only five voted for Biden.

You can see the complete data set that we compiled here.

Of course, this isn’t a complete immigration picture, because over these same three years, millions have flooded across the border illegally, which the Biden administration has been relocating to every corner of the country.

So, is this evidence of the “replacement theory,” or as the Encyclopedia Britannica website calls it, the “replacement fantasy”?

Here’s how Britannica describes this theory:

In the United States and certain other Western countries whose populations are mostly white, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging, in one of its versions, that left-leaning domestic or international elites, on their own initiative or under the direction of Jewish co-conspirators, are attempting to replace white citizens with nonwhite (i.e., Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Arab) immigrants. …

During the 2010s, replacement theory became popular in the United States among white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and right-wing militias, among other extremists, whose racist rhetoric and ideas were more freely expressed during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017–21).

Right-wing media personalities, including Fox News commentators Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, also attested to the conspiracy, though in ostensibly milder language that did not directly refer to race or explicitly invoke anti-Semitism. Thus, Carlson claimed that liberal Democrats were attempting to replace ‘you’ (the viewer) — implicitly understood to be white — with immigrants from ‘Third World’ (developing) countries — implicitly understood to be nonwhite — in order to create a permanent electoral majority loyal to the Democratic Party.

We are not about to speculate as to whether what’s going on is part of some grand conspiracy. (We don’t have to speculate about Britannica’s flagrant left-wing bias.)

But the numbers do show pretty clearly that as American citizens leave liberal counties in droves, immigrants – who, as the Census data show, are mostly Asian, Hispanic, and African – are filling in the gap. It’s almost as though Democrats are importing people to make up for the Americans their policies are driving away.

No, our only interest here is in highlighting the data. We’ll leave it to others to try to explain why this is happening. Or to call us racist for pointing it out.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board