President Donald Trump blames immigrants for virtually every problem in American economic life. In the president’s telling, the undocumented have been taking American-born citizens’ jobs, lowering their wages, driving up their costs, and bankrupting their welfare programs.
These claims are largely false.
Most studies suggest that immigrants do not typically reduce wages or job opportunities for the American-born — and actually pay more in taxes than they receive in social welfare benefits (this is especially true of undocumented immigrants, due to their ineligibility for Social Security and Medicare).
But there is at least one way that immigration really can hurt American-born people economically: When migrants come to a locality in large numbers, they can push up housing costs for longtime residents.
The president called attention to that fact earlier this week. In a Truth Social post Sunday, Trump wrote, “Fed Reserve working paper suggests Biden illegal immigrant wave drove up home prices 30%.”
Here, the president was garbling the findings of a recently published Dallas Federal Reserve study, which mostly contradicts his narrative about immigration’s economic harms.
Still, that paper did find that unauthorized immigration pushed up both rents and home prices during the Biden era (albeit by much less than Trump claimed).
This is a real problem. Yet, the solution is not to close America’s borders. Throttling immigration would make America less prosperous, while doing little to make housing more affordable.
Fortunately, there is a way to secure immigration’s considerable economic benefits while limiting its more modest downsides: We can simply make it easier to build more homes.
What the Dallas Fed study actually shows
The spike in unauthorized immigration under Biden was genuinely massive.
Between 2021 and 2024, seven million unauthorized immigrants settled in the United States. Put differently, America added 1.75 million unauthorized migrants per year during this period. For context, between 2000 and 2019, the US added an average of 0.1 million annually.
The extraordinary scale of the Biden-era wave provided researchers at the Dallas Fed with a unique opportunity to gauge unauthorized migration’s material consequences. Drawing on court records that revealed where immigrants had settled, the economists examined how local economic trends varied between places with more or fewer migrants, controlling for other variables.
As the president suggested, the immigration spike had some adverse impacts on local housing markets. Between early 2021 and early 2024, unauthorized migration pushed up the average American municipality’s home prices by 6.6 percent (not 30 percent, as Trump claimed) and its market rents by 4.3 percent.
In some contexts, rising home prices aren’t entirely unwelcome. Immigrants have helped spur the economic revival of many declining localities, which had previously suffered large drops in population, and, thus, in tax revenues and job opportunities. When such communities become more economically vibrant, property values tend to rebound — a welcome development for local homeowners.
Nevertheless, many American cities currently suffer from perennial crises of housing unaffordability. And the Fed’s research suggests that the Biden-era immigration surge made this problem worse, accounting for 30 percent of the overall increase in home prices during the period.
That’s significant, even as other factors played a collectively bigger role, among them tight post-pandemic labor markets, the soaring cost of construction materials, a jump in demand for floor space due to remote work (as middle-class families sought larger homes to accommodate home offices), and America’s pre-existing housing shortage.
This finding is consistent with past research into immigration’s impact on housing costs. And it is also intuitive, given the inherent and artificial constraints on housing construction in the United States.
After all, cities can add new residents much faster than they can build new housing. When a large number of immigrants show up in a city all at once, demand for homes will inevitably grow quicker than supply.
In a healthy housing market, this would merely be a short-term problem. Eventually, rising home values would encourage more building until prices fell back towards their pre-surge trajectory. Recent trends in Austin, Texas, are a case in point. Between 2021 and 2025, rents in that city fell by 4 percent, even as its population increased, thanks to a boom in housing construction.
In most US cities, however, land-use rules make it functionally impossible for housing supply to keep pace with demand. Bans on the construction of apartment buildings, large minimum lot size requirements, and other rules effectively cap the amount of housing that can be erected, no matter how much the population rises. Under these conditions, the Trumpian vision of immigration — in which American-born people and new arrivals are locked in a zero-sum struggle for scarce resources — becomes a little more true.
Slashing immigration is not the answer
It would be a mistake to respond to this by throttling immigration rather than fixing our housing markets.
Immigration is still economically beneficial for Americans on the whole. In truth, the Dallas Fed’s study does more to undermine nativists’ arguments than to support them.
According to that paper, the Biden-era migration wave did not take a fixed set of jobs from American-born people. Rather, it added roughly as many new jobs as new workers to local economies.
Which makes some sense: Immigrant workers do not just provide goods and services, but also consume them. Thus, although they increase an area’s labor supply, they also boost its labor demand, sparking job growth.
Further, contrary to nativists’ expectations, unauthorized immigration had no statistically significant impact on local wages during the Biden era and drove down government transfer spending per capita in impacted localities, likely because undocumented immigrants are ineligible for many social welfare programs.
Meanwhile, we know from previous research that immigration benefits economies in myriad ways, not least by fostering a more efficient division of labor and, thus, higher productivity. This is partly because immigrants are far more willing to move in response to shifting economic conditions than American-born workers, which makes them uniquely effective at filling gaps in local labor markets.
More critically, as the American population ages in the coming decades, our nation’s ratio of workers-to-retirees is set to fall. That will make supporting seniors’ pensions and health care cost more onerous for the young while also depressing economic growth and boosting deficits. Welcoming more working-age immigrants into America is the simplest way to mitigate these problems.
In any case, choking off immigration would do little to resolve America’s housing crisis. After all, even during a historic surge in unauthorized entries, 70 percent of the increase in home prices — and 80 percent of the rise in market rents — was due to factors other than immigration, according to the Dallas Fed’s report.
Thus, if we want to maximize Americans’ prosperity, we need to find a way to reconcile robust immigration with affordable housing.
This will probably require avoiding another abrupt surge in unauthorized migration, like that which transpired under Biden. Rapid, disorderly spikes in irregular immigration are politically toxic and economically disruptive. Even in a well-functioning housing market, a sudden jump in population will generate short-term price spikes.
Above all, however, we must pare back barriers to homebuilding. Until we do, housing will remain unaffordable in much of America, no matter how few immigrants we take in — and policymakers may struggle to sell voters on high levels of legal immigration, no matter how many facts they have on their side.
