For four years, Americans were told that the connection between mass illegal immigration and their skyrocketing rent was a figment of the nativist imagination. Millions of people poured across an open border, housing demand exploded in the very metro areas absorbing them, prices went vertical, and the credentialed class insisted these two phenomena were unrelated.
Anyone who suggested otherwise was peddling a talking point, they said. Now the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has run the numbers, and the talking point turns out to be arithmetic.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner made the case plainly in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital from the Great American State Fair.
“When we first came in with President Trump, we had open borders. We had tens of millions of illegals in our country,” Turner said. His conclusion was as direct as anything a cabinet secretary has said in decades. “Here in America, we prioritize American people and American people only. American houses are for American people.”
The predictable quarters will call that rhetoric. The problem for them is the research paper sitting on the Dallas Fed’s own website.
The Establishment’s Economists Confirm the Obvious
A working paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas provides the first systematic assessment of what the 2021 to 2024 border surge did to local labor and housing markets, built from administrative microdata on individual immigrants rather than the fuzzy survey estimates of past studies. The findings are brutal in their clarity.
Every 1 percent increase in unauthorized immigrant workers in a local market corresponded with roughly a 2.2 percent increase in home prices and a 1.4 percent increase in rents. Across the average metro area, unauthorized inflows accounted for about 30 percent of home price growth and 20 percent of rent growth during the period the paper describes as an unprecedented boom in illegal immigration.
Think about what that means for the young couple who watched starter homes vanish from their price range between 2021 and 2024. Nearly a third of that pain, according to economists working under the Federal Reserve’s own roof, traces back to a border policy Washington swore had nothing to do with it.
The paper, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates, puts the net addition at roughly 7 million people in three years, while House Homeland Security Committee tallies of total encounters under the Biden-Harris administration ran well past 10 million.
Housing supply, the researchers found, did not expand to meet the shock. Demand simply crushed the people already here.
The authors offer the standard caveat that the paper is a preliminary draft and does not represent official Fed views. Fine. But when the preliminary draft of the institution least inclined to hand conservatives a victory confirms exactly what conservatives argued while being dismissed as cranks, the caveat reads less like caution and more like a wince.
Enforcement as Housing Policy
Turner’s insight, and the reason his interview matters beyond the soundbite, is that he treats immigration enforcement as a component of housing policy rather than a separate file on a separate desk. Deportations and border security reduce artificial demand. Meanwhile, the supply side gets its own treatment.
President Trump signed an executive order in March stripping regulatory barriers from affordable home construction and another expanding access to mortgage credit so that qualified American buyers can actually compete for the homes that get built.
“That’s what we’re doing now, we are easing the regulatory environment, bringing the cost down, raising the supply so builders can build and homeowners can buy,” Turner said.
Pressed on when families will feel the difference, he pushed back on the notion that affordability has slipped down the administration’s list. “I think there is a misperception that this is not a priority. It is of utmost priority,” he said.
Demand discipline plus supply expansion is not a radical formula. It is the formula every economist would prescribe for any other market. It only became controversial when applying it required admitting that the border was open and that openness carried a price paid by American renters and would-be buyers, not by the politicians who engineered it.
The deeper scandal is not that the surge raised housing costs. Markets respond to demand, and 7 million new entrants in three years is demand. The scandal is that an entire apparatus of experts, fact-checkers, and editorial boards spent those years assuring Americans that their lying eyes were the problem.
The people crowded out of homeownership were told to blame corporate landlords, zoning boards, interest rates, anything but the policy choice sitting in plain view. They were owed honesty and got condescension.
Scripture treats the security of a family in its own home as a mark of a rightly ordered nation. “And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat” (Isaiah 65:21-22).
A government’s first duty runs to its own citizens, and a nation that lets the labor and savings of its people be bid away from them has inverted that order.
Turner’s phrase will be clipped, quoted, and denounced through the midterms. Let it be. The Dallas Fed’s numbers will still be there when the outrage cycle moves on, and so will the families finally seeing daylight between their paychecks and a mortgage.
The experts owed America an apology. A cabinet secretary willing to state the obvious is a decent down payment.
