Experts Claim Increased Illegal Immigration Under Biden Regime is Raising Rents & Housing Prices
Jose Nino
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According to immigration policy experts, the increase of illegal immigration under President Joe Biden has worsened already high housing costs for middle class Americans by worsening a shelter shortage.
The United States currently has a projected shortage of 4 million to 7 million housing units as developers struggle to stay with demand as harsh financial conditions and burdensome regulatory compliance keeps many housing units off the market, per Pew Charitable Trusts. Average Americans searching for a home or apartment are being pinched by rising housing costs owing to rising inflation and interest rates. That said, the recent influx of illegal alien invaders is placing more stress on the system by exacerbating the current shortage of housing units in the market at a rate that developers can’t keep up with, per experts who were in correspondence with the Daily Caller.
“Importing millions of people will clearly increase the demand for all necessities, including housing, and that’s true whether the people come here legally or illegally,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, said to the Daily Caller. “The effects seem to be most noticeable, or at least have gotten the most media attention, in border states and so-called sanctuary cities where Governor Abbott has been sending the flood of illegals.”
The foreign-born population under the Biden regime has increased by 6.6 million, with a projected 58% of the increase largely due to illegal immigration, per research from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
“I’m not sure anybody can exactly quantify the effect,” Ira Mehlman, media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said to the Daily Caller. “Logically, when people come here in large numbers, they need a place to live, and supply and demand dictate that when there’s more demand than supply, the price goes up.”
The recent mass migration Zerg Rush has worried renters. Shelter prices, which are strongly correlated to the price of rent, increased by 20.9% since January 2021. Since Biden was installed in office in January 2021, inflation has raised prices by 19.3%
Illegal aliens often compete with lower income Americans, thereby increasing rents at the lowest level. Approximately 25% of Americans spend over half of their income on rent, and half of all renters spend over 30% on rent, per Pew Charitable Trusts.
Miami had over 626,000 illegal immigrants living in the city in 2021, while Houston had close to 413,000, San Diego had 188,847 and Loudoun County, Virginia, had over 26,000 — 6.3% of the county’s population, per the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s data.
New York and Miami have witnessed their home prices increase by 8.7% and 8.0% over the last year ending in February, which is higher than the 6.4% American average, per data from S&P Global.
Even prior to the most recent surge in illegal immigration, the US was already lagging in the demand for affordable apartments, witnessing the total number fall by 4.7 million from 2015 to 2020, per a report from the National Multifamily Housing Council. The report found that immigration was a major propellant of apartment demand.
“It can take a year and a half to two years to actually get one apartment built, so there’s no way to accommodate this massive illegal flow that exacerbates the housing shortage in the United States and that, in turn, increases the amount of money that multifamily housing businesses charge for those units,” Arthur said to the Daily Caller.
1.45 million new privately owned housing units were built in the US in 2023, largely concentrated in states such as Texas instead of California due to costs and permitting regulations, per research from Consumer Affairs. The cost of building a home has risen by close to $100,000 per unit from 2019 to 2022, with it currently totaling around $392,000 on average.
“At the rate they are coming in, you can’t build quickly enough,” Arthur said to the Daily Caller. “You need to actually get the financing, which means that you need to prove that there’s going to be a need, and if you’re talking about an uncertain number of people coming in, which is certainly true now, getting that financing becomes all the more difficult.”
Arthur believes that since the government does not reveal how many people have entered the US illegally, developers have to guess the demand in the market for housing developments that often take years to finish off.
“While advocates of illegal immigration claim that importing vast numbers of low-wage labor will reduce the cost of construction, that does not address the structural problems in the housing market surrounding interest rates and record high material costs,” Antoni said to the Daily Caller. “Furthermore, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that illegal immigrants today increase the supply of housing brought to market more than they increase the demand for housing.”
“The damage is done with respect to the market. The market is going to respond, but you’re also talking about a population of people, again, this is not universally true, but by and large, they have very low levels of income, they don’t have any job skills and they haven’t had the benefits of good education,” Arthur added. “So they’re primarily going to be occupying space at the lowest level, which means that they’re going to be directly in competition with the most disadvantaged Americans, not just in the job market but in the housing market as well.”
Mass migration is an elite project. Full stop. It serves to depress worker wages while enriching corrupt plutocrats in search of quick profits. To protect the demographic integrity of the US and the purchasing power of its workers, immigration must be restricted.
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