Fed Study Proves Biden Immigration Policies Raised the Rent

Heading into the midterm elections, housing affordability has become one of the leading issues, with Democrats accusing Republicans of not doing enough to bring down the cost of rent and mortgages. But if Democrats truly cared about making housing more affordable, they’d be working with Republicans to deport illegal aliens and stem the flood of migrants into the country – and the data proves it.

According to a recent working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the Biden era’s unprecedented surge of approximately 7 to 10 million illegal aliens into the country significantly raised house prices and rents during the 2021-2024 immigration boom. In the average market, the flood of new arrivals accounted for roughly 30 percent of house-price increases and 20 percent of rent increases during that period.

In hard cash terms, for every $10,000 a home's value climbed in the average market, roughly $3,000 of that increase traces back to Biden’s open borders policies.

These numbers have real pain behind them. Think of the young family that just lost another bidding war, the newlyweds stuck renting because the amount they need for a down payment keeps drifting out of reach, or the new college graduate who finds that he suddenly can’t afford rent in his own city.

That is the real cost of Democrats’ illegal immigration obsession.

But it’s not just immigration that’s technically “illegal” that’s the problem. Springfield, Ohio, shows what happens when liberal leaders put the interests of outsiders ahead of hardworking Americans.

Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio recently posted on X that this city, with a population under 60,000, saw rent and home prices explode after Washington bureaucrats selected the town to resettle thousands of Haitian migrants on a parole and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs. In 2022, the average home price was about $140,000. By 2026, it had jumped to roughly $220,000. Average rent rose from about $865 a month to nearly $1,300.

Springfield’s migrants were not illegal aliens. They arrived through legal parole and TPS pipelines. Without any input from local residents, leaders in Washington and Columbus – including Republican Governor Mike DeWine – flooded this small city with newcomers who drove up the cost of housing and wreaked havoc on the community in other ways, including on the roads.

The insult to American taxpayers gets even worse when considering that many of the same foreign nationals adding pressure to the housing market are being helped along by taxpayer-subsidized rent and welfare. Many illegal aliens and recently-arrived migrants are even receiving government-backed mortgages at a time when the dream of homeownership is slipping out of reach for millions of American citizens.

Think about the absurdity of this arrangement.

Liberals bring thousands of foreigners into American communities, straining the local housing supply. Then, the government helps pay their rent with taxpayer dollars, leaving Americans to compete against people who just got here for free lunch. In effect, Americans are competing against their own tax dollars.

This scheme forces working Americans to pay once through their taxes, and again through higher rent and higher home prices.

There is nothing inherently wrong with immigration. Indeed, America has always been a nation that welcomes those willing to work hard and increase the overall prosperity of the nation. But the government’s first responsibility should be to its own citizens, not citizens of another country. Few things are more backward, or more un-American, than a government that makes life harder for its own taxpayers in the name of helping the rest of the world.

Thankfully, President Trump’s return to the White House has started to end this insanity. In the past 18 months, his administration restored serious border enforcement and achieved a 94 percent reduction in illegal entries compared to the Biden era. He also resumed deportations for those with no lawful right to remain here and challenged in court the various schemes liberals have used to turn short-term relief programs into permanent settlement operations.

Late last month, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Mullin v. Doe which cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, including many of the migrants whose arrival transformed places like Springfield almost overnight. Local news recently reported that many of them are already starting to self-deport.

The effects of that enforcement are now reaching far beyond the border. Texas Republican Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne, who has repeatedly pressed her colleagues in Washington to confront the Dallas Fed’s findings, argues that the removal or voluntary departure of more than 3.5 million illegal aliens is already easing pressure on America’s housing market. “It’s having an immediate reaction in the market on housing,” she told reporters. “We have to continue that.”

What the Fed’s report makes clear is that border enforcement and deportations are two of the most important things the Trump administration can do to drive down housing costs. Housing markets do not correct overnight, and the damage inflicted during the Biden years will take time to unwind. But as illegal aliens leave and unlawful entries remain near historic lows, things are finally moving in the right direction.

That is what Trump’s border policies have begun to do. They have stopped the federal government from adding millions of new competitors to communities already desperate for housing.

For years, Democrats and their media allies insisted that mass illegal immigration was cost-free compassion. They told hard-working Americans that millions of illegal border crossings could be absorbed without driving up rents or crowding our scarce housing markets.

Now, all those lies are being exposed. For the first time in years, American families are no longer being forced to chase a dream their own government is actively pushing further out of reach.