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A new working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas demolishes the comfortable narratives the left has used to excuse skyrocketing housing costs: from early 2021 to early 2024 the nation saw an unprecedented boom in unauthorized immigration that added roughly seven million people to the U.S. population, and those inflows had real, measurable impacts on local housing markets. The authors find that these unauthorized worker inflows lifted local employment but also drove up rents and home prices without triggering a matching expansion in housing supply.
Put plainly, this was a demand shock hitting an already tight market. Dallas Fed economists show that unauthorized immigrant worker flows increased local employment about one-for-one during the boom period while simultaneously acting as a housing demand surge in places where supply is stubbornly inelastic. That combination — more people competing for the same handful of homes — is textbook inflation for shelter costs.
The numbers are stark and uncompromising: an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows equal to 1 percent of a local area’s initial employment raised local house prices by about 2.2 percent and market rents by roughly 1.4 percent. For the average metropolitan area exposed to the immigration boom, the paper estimates unauthorized flows could explain about 30 percent of the total house-price increase and about 20 percent of rent growth between March 2021 and March 2024. These are not abstract models — they are concrete contributors to the affordability crisis crushing American families.
This is where the politics meet the pocketbook. The surge did not happen in a policy vacuum; it coincided with administration choices that failed to secure the border and incentivized mass movement. Conservatives have warned for years that porous borders aren’t just a national-security problem — they are an economic one that lands squarely on the backs of everyday Americans paying rent and saving for homes.
The Dallas Fed paper also finds damaging downstream effects on wages and public finances: per-capita labor income fell in affected localities, reflecting a compositional shift toward lower-paid workers, and government transfers per capita declined as newly arrived workers were less likely to use safety-net programs. In other words, the rush of new labor masked an erosion of average household earning power while straining local housing — a double hit for middle-class families trying to get ahead.
If Washington’s priority is truly affordability for Americans, the remedy is obvious: enforce immigration laws, secure the border, and restore sensible migration controls so housing markets and communities can stabilize. Policymakers who pretend this is merely an economic abstraction do so at the expense of citizens who work, save, and play by the rules. The Dallas Fed’s sober analysis should be a wake-up call to any leader who still believes open borders are cost-free.
Finally, conservative Americans should demand accountability from elected officials and the media that too often cheerlead for ideological open-borders experiments while ignoring the real victims — families priced out of neighborhoods, young people denied homeownership, and taxpayers left to clean up the bill. The data are clear; the choice is ours: stand for secure borders and common-sense policy, or keep letting bad decisions drive up the price of the American dream.
