A Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper has put hard numbers on what millions of American renters and homebuyers already felt in their wallets: the unprecedented wave of illegal immigration between 2021 and 2024 drove up both home prices and rents in metropolitan areas across the country. The paper found that a 1 percent increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows raised local home prices by about 2.2 percent and rents by roughly 1.4 percent, and that new housing construction never expanded enough to absorb the added demand.
The findings land at a moment when housing affordability remains one of the top economic concerns for working families. And they confirm what Republicans argued throughout the Biden years: that an open-border posture carries real, measurable costs for the Americans who have to compete for shelter in the same local markets flooded with new arrivals.
As Fox News reported, the Dallas Fed researchers compiled individual immigration court records and government administrative data to trace the economic footprint of illegal immigration across average U.S. metropolitan areas. The paper described the 2021, 2024 period as an "unprecedented boom" in illegal immigration and cited Congressional Budget Office estimates that net unauthorized immigration added roughly 7 million people to the U.S. population before the surge began slowing sharply around mid-2024.
The scale of the housing impact is difficult to dismiss. Illegal immigrant worker flows accounted for roughly 30 percent of home-price growth and about 20 percent of rent growth in the average metropolitan area between March 2021 and March 2024. Those same inflows explained an estimated 30 percent of employment growth in the average local labor market over the same window.
Employment rose nearly one-for-one with the arrival of unauthorized workers, a 1 percent increase in illegal immigrant workers relative to a local workforce corresponded with roughly a 1 percent increase in overall employment. Yet the study found no evidence that the immigration surge lowered average wages. In other words, new arrivals filled jobs without dragging down pay, but the housing market could not keep pace with the bodies pouring in.
The paper also noted that areas with larger increases in unauthorized immigrant workers experienced declines in government transfer payments, a finding the authors said differed from prior survey-based research.
Democrats have long pointed to immigration as a way to ease labor shortages and support economic growth. The Dallas Fed data does show employment gains. But the same data reveals a housing market buckling under demand that builders never met. For the family watching rent climb year after year, the abstract economic benefit of a bigger labor pool offers cold comfort when the landlord raises the price again.
Breitbart noted that unauthorized immigration under Biden averaged 1.75 million per year from 2021 to 2024, nearly double the rate of legal immigration and dramatically higher than the annual average of roughly 100,000 from 2000 to 2019. A separate Department of Housing and Urban Development investigation found that the foreign-born population grew by more than 6 million during that stretch, the largest such increase over a short period in American history, driving up housing demand in markets already short on supply.
The financial burden extended well beyond housing. FEMA's Shelter and Services Program, designed to help cities cope with migrant arrivals, ballooned from $363.8 million in fiscal year 2023 to $650 million in fiscal year 2024, with some lawmakers pushing for as much as $3 billion, the New York Post reported. Atlanta alone saw its allocation jump from $4.85 million to $10.89 million in a single year. Roughly 12 million illegal border crossings were documented from the time Biden took office in January 2021 through mid-2024.
Those numbers represent real dollars extracted from taxpayers to manage a crisis that federal policy created. And they do not capture the downstream costs borne by local school districts, emergency rooms, and law enforcement agencies that absorbed the population shock without a vote or a warning.
Housing prices and FEMA budgets are not the only consequences of the Biden-era border collapse. The policy of releasing illegal immigrants into the interior produced a cascade of public-safety failures that no economic model can quantify. In one case, an illegal immigrant released under Biden received a 50-year sentence for producing child abuse material involving young relatives.
In another, a convicted felon who gained citizenship under the Biden administration was charged in the death of a DHS employee killed while walking her dog. Each case represents a preventable harm, a person who should never have been in the country, or whose criminal history should have disqualified them from the benefit of the doubt.
These are not isolated anecdotes cherry-picked to score political points. They are the predictable results of a system that prioritized volume over vetting, released people faster than it could track them, and treated the southern border as a suggestion rather than a boundary.
The Dallas Fed authors were careful to note that their paper is "a preliminary draft circulated for professional comment" and that its findings "do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System." They also stressed that the estimates refer to the average metropolitan area in the study and "do not suggest immigration was the sole driver of rising housing costs nationwide."
Fair enough. No serious person argues that illegal immigration was the only force pushing housing costs upward. Interest rates, zoning restrictions, material costs, and labor shortages in the construction trades all played a role. The National Association of Home Builders has warned that America is roughly 250,000 construction workers short, a deficit that makes the affordability crisis harder to solve regardless of immigration policy.
But the Fed paper isolates one variable, illegal immigrant inflows, and finds it responsible for nearly a third of home-price growth and a fifth of rent growth in the average metro area over three years. That is not a rounding error. That is a policy choice with a price tag, and the bill went to renters and first-time buyers who had no say in the matter.
The Trump administration made securing the border and deportation a priority in its first months of 2025. The contrast with the prior four years is stark. The administration has reported 13 straight months of zero border releases, a record that would have been unthinkable during the Biden years, when catch-and-release was effectively the default.
Whether tighter enforcement will eventually ease housing pressure remains to be seen. The 7 million people who arrived during the boom are largely still here, still renting apartments, still competing for the same limited housing stock. Reversing the damage will take more than a policy shift at the border, it will require sustained construction, zoning reform, and the political will to enforce the law consistently.
But the Dallas Fed paper at least clarifies what happened and who paid for it. The surge was not a victimless abstraction debated in faculty lounges. It was a measurable transfer of cost from illegal immigrants seeking housing to the legal residents already living in those communities.
When the government opens the door and 7 million people walk through, somebody has to move over. The Fed just told us who did, and how much it cost them.
