A new Federal Reserve working paper adds hard data to a dire economic realities that tens of millions of hardworking Americans already face: being priced out of homeownership or trapped paying ungodly high rents.
For years, the housing affordability crisis was blamed almost entirely on low interest rates, pandemic-era demand, institutional buyers, and a shortage of new construction. However, one major point was largely and conveniently ignored by mainstream media: the Biden-Harris regime's open border policies, which facilitated a massive illegal alien invasion.
The paper, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, uses new government data to measure the labor and housing market effects of the illegal alien invasion from early 2021 through the first half of 2024.
"From early 2021 to early 2024, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented boom in unauthorized immigration, followed by a rapid slowdown beginning in mid-2024," the authors of the report wrote.
Dallas Fed researchers found that illegal alien worker flows raised local employment roughly one-for-one, with a 1% increase in such workers relative to initial employment levels lifting local employment by about 0.96%. They found no significant evidence that the inflows reduced average weekly wages.
The researchers noted that the impact was more pronounced in housing markets nationwide. A 1% increase in illegal alien worker flows was associated with a 2.2% rise in local home prices and a 1.4% increase in rents, with little evidence that new housing supply expanded enough to absorb the added demand.
They described this inflow as triggering a "housing demand shock in the presence of relatively fixed short-run housing supply," accounting for 30% of home price growth and 20% of rent growth in the average local market during the boom period.
The Democratic Party's nation-killing open-border invasion imposed real economic costs on working-class citizens, the very people Democrats claim to champion.
As the scale of the post-2021 illegal alien invasion becomes clearer, so does the economic fallout.
Millions of illegals strained housing markets, adding demand at a time when supply was tight, affordability collapsed, and citizens were being priced out of the American Dream.
It is hard to ignore that the party which once branded itself as the defender of working-class Americans has increasingly aligned itself with far-left activists, globalist billionaires, and a future voter base built around mass migration. In the process, Democrats helped create an affordability crisis that harmed the very households they claim to protect.
The answer is clear and most Americans agree:
Meanwhile, socialist Democrats continue lecturing the nation that "racist capitalism" is responsible for the economic misery facing working-class Americans. Yet according to the Fed paper, the illegal alien invasion is at the center of what sparked housing affordability mess.