Economics 101: Increase supply and prices go down. Raise demand, and prices go up.
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That’s what we are seeing in spades in the housing market in the wake of Joe Biden releasing as many as 14 million illegals into the interior of the country.
Housing prices in the U.S. went up. More people competing for the same supply of housing will do that. And illegals, who qualify for public subsidy programs allowing them to buy over other Americans, were ravenously buying. They also fill public housing, leaving Americans to go without, and populate growing ‘informal’ shantytowns, though President Trump is trying to put a stop to it.
That’s called a classic demand shock, which has the same effect as inflation, but isn’t the same as inflation, given that if the problem can be removed, the price hikes go away, not gradually but suddenly. It’s a very good additional argument for mass deportation.
According to the Washington Post, which has a nit-picky piece attempting to deflect the actual rising-price problem:
Drafted by economists Daniel Wilson of the San Francisco Fed and Xiaoqing Zhou of the Dallas Fed, the working paper is the first systematic attempt to measure the local economic effects of what the authors call an unprecedented boom in unauthorized immigration, which added 7 million people to the U.S. population between early 2021 and early 2024.
The authors used restricted court records showing where immigrants settled, along with records of migrants granted temporary permission to enter the country. The study found that an inflow of unauthorized workers equal to 1 percent of the local workforce raised area home prices about 2.2 percent and rents about 1.4 percent, with no detectable pickup in home building to absorb the demand.
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These estimates imply that, in the average metropolitan area, unauthorized immigration raised house prices by 6.6 percent from early 2021 to early 2024. The actual home price growth was 22.4 percent in those markets over the period. This means unauthorized immigration explains roughly 30 percent of home-price growth — a meaningful contribution, but not a 30 percent increase in home prices as stated by Trump.
Actually, contrary to what the Post claims about President Trump having no facts, there have been previous studies from the Dallas Fed, no less, indicating that this phenomenon was happening.
And so now here come the Democrats, tra-la-la, telling us they are suddenly concerned about ‘affordability’ as their way of making political hay. They made the problem, now they position themselves as saviors.
It certainly would explain their mad dash in many blue cities to throw up housing — big socialist-style apartment blocks the way Hugo Chavez once did, with neither parking nor amenities. They seem to be all in for housing illegals no matter what it does to the quality of life for the Americans. One can only guess about their seismic worthiness. have got illegals to house, and rather than focus on what they do to home affordability here (and I would bet, falling home values in their home countries) they seek to house them any which way they can, betting on President Trump failing in his bid to deport all of them. We’ll see about that one.
In the meantime, this study should shut up a few Democrats who bray for open borders, yet drive housing costs skyward with every illegal they bring in.
Image: Pixabay, edited in Canva // Pixabay Content License, with addition of public domain image
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