(José Niño, Headline USA) A Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas study concluded that the wave of illegal immigrants arriving during President Joe Biden’s tenure inflated housing prices and rental costs for Americans, Breitbart News reported.
Biden’s immigration policies ushered millions of migrants onto American soil at historic speed. When his administration ended, the nation’s foreign born population stood at nearly 52 million people, an unprecedented total.
Dallas Fed researchers studied illegal immigration’s influence on housing between early 2021 and early 2024. Their research established that adding millions of people to the population drove expenses upward.
“According to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, net entry of this category of immigrants added roughly 7 million people to the U.S. population over 2021 to 2024 (1.75 million per year), nearly double that of legal immigration,” the report states.
The authors emphasized how dramatically recent flows departed from historical norms. “To put this growth in perspective, net unauthorized immigration—that is, immigration of individuals who entered the country without being formally admitted for purposes of immigration law— averaged only 0.1 million a year from 2000 to 2019 and was slightly negative from 2010 to 2019.”
Examining housing market consequences, researchers calculated specific effects from migrant worker arrivals. “First, we find that during the boom period an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows equal to 1% of a local area’s initial employment increased local house prices by 2.2% and increased local rents by 1.4%,” the study found. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that [unauthorized immigrant worker flows] can explain about 30% of the total growth in house prices and 20% of total growth in rents over the boom period for the average local market.”
Other federal agencies documented similar patterns. A Housing and Urban Development investigation released last year determined that mass migration especially burdened lower income Americans lacking government assistance.
“This immigration-driven increase in households has contributed to a significant increase in housing demand, thus driving up housing prices,” the HUD report noted. “In fact, in some markets, immigration has accounted for nearly all of the increase in housing demand in recent years.”
Academic work from abroad validated these conclusions. Researchers in Denmark released a study in September 2025 showing significant effects on local residents. “More specifically, we find that a one percentage point increase in the local immigration influx over a five-year horizon relative to the local population in the base year 1995 leads to an average increase of approximately 6 percent and 11 percent in private rental prices and house prices at the municipal level, respectively, during the same period.”
Steven Camarota from the Center for Immigration Studies informed Congress in 2024 that “a 5-percentage-point increase in the recent immigrant share of a metro area’s population is associated with a 12-percent increase in the average U.S.-born household’s rent, relative to their income.”
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
