Remember when your rent went up and you thought maybe you were just imagining things? Good news: you were not hallucinating. Bad news: it was worse than you thought.
A working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has put actual numbers to what millions of Americans experienced firsthand during the Biden administration. As USA Journal reported, the paper combines immigration court records with government administrative data and concludes that the unprecedented wave of illegal immigration between 2021 and 2024 meaningfully drove up both home prices and rents across the country.
The findings, which the New York Post also covered, are pretty straightforward. For every 1% increase in unauthorized workers relative to a local labor force, home prices rose roughly 2.2% and rents climbed about 1.4%. Homebuilding, meanwhile, did not magically speed up to accommodate the surge. Because lumber does not care about your immigration policy. It just sits there being expensive.
Here is where it gets really fun for anyone who has been writing rent checks. Between March 2021 and March 2024, illegal immigration accounted for approximately 30% of home price growth and 20% of rent growth in the average American metro area. So about one in every five dollars of your rent increase can be traced back to a housing market that suddenly had millions of additional people competing for the same limited supply of places to live.
The paper noted that immigration remains a polarizing political issue. Republicans argue Biden's border policies strained housing and public resources, while Democrats counter that immigration helped ease labor shortages and supported economic growth. Those are two very different ways to describe the same situation, which is basically the entire American political experience in one sentence.
What makes this particularly entertaining is that Democrats spent the Biden years holding hearings and giving impassioned speeches about housing affordability. They blamed landlords. They blamed developers. They blamed zoning laws. They blamed everything except the policy they were actively implementing that was adding enormous demand pressure to an already strained housing market. That takes a special kind of talent.
The report also underscores something fairly basic: the laws to secure the border were already on the books. The infrastructure existed. What changed was the willingness to enforce them. Since January 2025, housing cost growth has reportedly begun to moderate, though these things do not reverse overnight.
So to recap: a Federal Reserve bank published a paper confirming that flooding the housing market with millions of additional consumers without a corresponding increase in supply makes prices go up. Somewhere, an economics professor is staring at this headline and whispering to himself that he has been teaching this exact concept to freshmen for thirty years.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
