Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says it is “preposterous” to suggest that President Joe Biden is importing millions of migrants to the United States to inflate political power in favor of Democrats.

During a Senate budget hearing on Wednesday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Mayorkas if it is a fact “that the number of illegal immigrants that you and the president allow into our country counts for congressional district reapportionment?”

Mayorkas initially responded, saying “I’m not sure I understand your question but I can surely share with you that I disagree with its phrasing.”

Kennedy asked again, “Isn’t it true that the number of illegal immigrants that you and President Biden have allowed into our country counts in allocating electoral votes?” to which Mayorkas eventually responded, “The notion, Senator, that we intend to allow illegal immigration is nothing short of preposterous.”

Mayorkas’s remarks come as a Rasmussen Reports survey showed this month that a majority of 57 percent of likely voters — including 54 percent of white voters and 68 percent of Hispanics — believe Biden is importing migrants to the U.S. to create a permanent Democrat majority that Republicans will be unable to overcome.

Indeed, immigration plays a significant role in congressional apportionment and thus, the number of electoral college votes in presidential elections.

In 2020, for example, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) researchers revealed that the nation’s immigration policy — which annually brings more than a million legal immigrants to the U.S. as well as millions of migrants — was responsible for the shift of about 26 House seats.

“To put this number in perspective, changing the party of 21 members of the current Congress would flip the majority in the U.S. House. The 26 seats represent the effect of all immigrants and their children 17 years of age and younger, and is not the change from one census to another,” CIS researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler wrote:

Illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born minor children will redistribute five seats in 2020, with Ohio, Michigan, Alabama, Minnesota, and West Virginia each losing one seat in 2020 that they otherwise would have had. California and Texas will each have two additional seats, and New York will have one additional seat. [Emphasis added]

For years, research has consistently shown that the larger a region’s foreign-born population, the more likely that region is to vote for Democrats over Republicans.

In 2019, The Atlantic‘s Ronald Brownstein found that nearly 90 percent of House congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average are won by Democrats. This means every congressional district with a foreign-born population exceeding 15.5 percent has a 90 percent chance of electing Democrats and only a 10 percent chance of electing Republicans.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Axios, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal have all admitted that rapid demographic shifts spurred by mass immigration are tilting the nation toward a permanent Democrat political majority.

“The single biggest threat to Republicans’ long-term viability is demographics,” Axios reported in 2019. “The numbers simply do not lie … there’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans.”

Already, the U.S. has the most generous immigration system in the world and is expected to import 15 million new foreign-born voters by 2044. About eight million of those voters will have arrived entirely due to the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.