Immigration cannot outpace housing supply without impacting housing costs for everyone.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/canada-migrati...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304685 (citations)
Subsidize the housing if you must to ensure you have affordable housing for peak population before decline kicks in, as it will everywhere.
I think a lot of people are truly in denial about just how many illegal immigrants are in the country, and they all need housing.
However, they seem to simply assert causality. It would seem far more likely that people (illegal or not) move to areas experiencing economic booms that, among other things, is push up home prices.
I'm sorry, but your argument sounds like the typical HN oversimplification that leads people to say they could build Dropbox in a weekend.
Yes, they could have possibly overlooked things that appear to be obvious in retrospect. Happens all the time because it may or not have been the focus of the paper, or the time constraints may have not permitted this level of research. This is why we usually have multiple papers, each building on each other over time, on the same data sets/topics.
Since housing starts are more likely in areas seeing rapid housing price appreciation, and construction employs many illegal workers, you could make just as strong of a case that increased housing costs drive unauthorized migration rather than the other way around.
That's why it's so hard, and so important, to disentangle correlation and causation.
In other news, water is wet.
The fact that people are arguing over this is astonishing to me. Politics morphing into the religion of modernity is the worst thing that has happened this century thus far.
> 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. We provide the first systematic empirical assessment of the labor- and housing-market effects of this episode. Using newly available administrative microdata on individual immigrants, we construct measures of net unauthorized immigration at the national and local levels and exploit plausibly exogenous variation across local markets. We find that unauthorized immigrant worker flows (UIWF) increased local employment approximately one-for-one, without significant declines in local wages. These inflows also raised local house prices and rents without expanding housing supply, consistent with a housing demand shock in the face of short-run inelastic supply. Lastly, we find that UIWF reduced labor income per capita, consistent with downward wage composition of the local workforce, and strongly reduced government transfers. These findings should help inform policy debates surrounding how unauthorized immigrant labor supply impacts local labor and housing markets as well as public finances.
Basically what the paper says is at a city-by-city level unauthorized immigrants increase housing prices in to a similar degree to authorized immigrants (about 1% pop increase -> 2% housing price increase), are roughly 100% employed (increase local employment 1:1), and use government services at a lower rate than the base population (about 1% pop increase -> overall 5% decrease in spending). Then a lot of discussion about methodology and related work. I'm a little skeptical of some of the assumptions, they (and apparently the citations) don't appear to account for the fact that in all cases people are more likely to move to places with jobs (economic activity driving labor demand), housing supply is generally pretty inelastic on the scale of a couple years, and so even if nobody moved to the city it's possible wages (and housing prices) would go up anyway.
Cause you know, that's typically how things work when you're actually concerned about economic impacts and arn't just a rcist dog whistling dog & pony circus show looking to deflect from the other bad to disasterous economic decisions.
Think about it: if this is true, American citizens have been harmed by Businesses that illegally hired workers and cause $X amount of damage. Instead of going after $X + damages of $Y, we've commited to spend $Z amount to go after those workers, even when all evidence points to the illegal hiring both brings in a profit and displaces american workers.
It's such a pointless series of racist shrugs and waste of tax payer funds. Instead of going after the profits of businesses, we go into debt trying to attack workers.
And nobody it seems wants to see higher density housing unless there’s really no choice. So people end up in large housing which is mostly empty after the kid(s) leave. And their retirement depends on selling out for a profit.
Whoever has the money to develop housing is in a position to exploit the scarcity as well.
So a housing price spiral is a result of a properly functioning market.
skiing_crawling•3h ago
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