Recent research published in sociology A Texas program that transports immigrants to cities led by Democratic mayors boosted support for President Donald Trump in certain destinations during the 2024 election, it has been revealed. The study shows that the arrival of immigrant buses amplified voter fears about crime and immigration, pushed floating votes toward the Republican Party, and increased turnout among conservative voters.
From 2022 to 2024, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has launched a policy to transport more than 100,000 recently arrived migrants from the southern border to six specific cities. These destinations include Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC
Each of these urban centers had previously enacted sanctuary ordinances. Protection policies generally protect illegal immigrants by limiting the extent to which local law enforcement cooperates with federal immigration authorities. By dispatching buses to these locations, Texas authorities created highly visible migration events far from the actual border.
Sociologists and political researchers have studied how communities respond to sudden changes in population for decades. A central idea in this field is the concept of minority threat. This theory suggests that when the majority group perceives a rapid growth in the minority population, the majority group often responds with exclusionary attitudes and voting patterns.
Such reactions do not necessarily require direct personal contact with the new arrivals. Rather, these feelings of threat are often constructed through political messages and media discourses that frame demographic change as a crisis.
The researchers wanted to understand whether the intense political scene surrounding Texas’ bus plan actually changed the way people voted. William Scarborough, an associate professor at the University of North Texas, led the study. He collaborated with Ronald Kwon, also an associate professor at the University of North Texas, and David Brady, a public policy professor at the University of Southern California.
Together, they sought to measure the program’s electoral impact and identify specific types of voters who changed their behavior. To measure the impact of the busing program, researchers analyzed county-level voting data from the past three presidential elections. They compared the 2024 election results with the 2016 and 2020 election results, which were held before the buses started arriving.
The researchers compared voting trends in counties that accepted immigrant buses with voting trends in similar counties that did not accept busing. This approach allowed the researchers to isolate the specific changes that occurred in the destination city. This effectively removed the influence of broader national trends from the calculations.
The data revealed clear changes in voter preferences within the target region. In counties that received busloads of migrants, Donald Trump’s vote share increased by more than 3 percentage points compared to his performance in previous elections. This increase holds true across multiple statistical tests.
The researchers compared the urban centers they studied to other large cities and also to untreated counties within the same state. In each scenario, Trump performed better in areas that received busloads of immigrants. After establishing this county-level trend, Scarborough and his colleagues looked for specific mechanisms to drive change.
They looked at individual-level exit poll data from the Associated Press’ VoteCast survey. This massive dataset provided detailed demographic and voting information on thousands of voters. This allowed researchers to track changes in political preferences and turnout while accounting for factors such as age, race, and income.
Exit polls showed that swing voters play a major role in changing the political landscape in the cities they vote for. People who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 were more likely to switch support for Trump in 2024 if they lived in areas where migrant buses reach. This change had a lot to do with increased fear of crime among voters.
The busing program appears to have amplified crime-related concerns and directed these former Biden supporters to more restrictive immigration platforms. Researchers also found that the bus program energized conservative voters who had previously stayed home. Even self-identified Republicans who did not vote in the 2020 election were far more likely to vote in 2024 if they lived in the target city.
For this group, voting motivations were strongly tied to growing concerns about immigration policy. Political messages surrounding migrant buses effectively mobilized these people to participate in the electoral process. The bus brought awareness of the border crisis directly to local news stations, sparking a partisan reaction.
At the same time, the researchers looked to see whether busing policies hinder participation among liberal voters. They wondered if Democrats withheld the vote in protest of the situation. But the data showed no evidence of that, and the change in liberal voting patterns was not statistically significant.
Democrats who voted in 2020 were just as likely to vote in 2024, regardless of whether their city accepted busloads of immigrants. The overall change in election results was caused by floating votes switching sides and conservative voters increasing their turnout. This means that the overall demographic effect was caused by specific segments of the population that reacted to the news.
The number of immigrants actually transported by the Texas Plan was relatively small compared to the total number of foreign-born populations already living in these large cities. For example, new arrivals were a small part of existing immigrant communities in places like New York and Los Angeles. The researchers therefore concluded that political changes were likely driven by the media and the political construction of the migrant crisis.
Direct, day-to-day interactions between voters and immigrants are likely to be less influential than ongoing news coverage. Public discussions frequently linked the arrival of buses to increased crime rates in destination cities. However, independent research consistently shows that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than mainland-born nationals.
Local influxes of immigrants have not been shown to increase local crime rates. Despite this fact, the perception of a link between busing and criminal activity had a significant impact among voters, particularly among floating voters. David Brady pointed to a disconnect between actual crime data in these destinations and voters’ perceptions.
He highlighted the power of political messages to influence the outcome of the 2024 election. “Governor Abbott of Texas and President Trump were able to activate and mobilize anti-immigrant sentiment, which had a measurable impact on the outcome of the presidential election,” Brady said.
He also issued a warning to the public. “Given the overwhelming evidence that immigration is associated with reduced crime, voters should be especially skeptical when politicians falsely try to link immigration to crime.”
Although the study examines voter behavior in detail, the researchers acknowledge that their study has some limitations. For example, the exit poll data they used did not include survey responses from Washington, DC. This means that one of the six cities included was excluded from the individual-level analysis.
The researchers also relied on county-level voting data rather than smaller precinct-level data. District boundaries change frequently, making long-term comparisons across multiple election cycles difficult. However, county-level data may mask very local neighborhood trends that could provide more detailed information.
Future research could explore how these media narratives take root in different types of communities across the country. Investigators might investigate whether small towns respond to sudden changes in demographics in the same way as large urban centers. Additionally, sociologists might study the long-term effects of these busing programs to see whether heightened political fear fades over time.
The results of this study show that as state governments take a more active role in immigration policy, their actions can easily spill over. These regional decisions have the power to greatly influence national elections. Politicians can effectively create political crises that change voting behavior far beyond their own borders.
The study, “The Impact of the Texas Immigrant Bus Program on the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election,” was authored by William Scarborough, Ronald Kwon, and David Brady.
