Even the pro-globalist editors of The Economist magazine are admitting Vice President JD Vance is correct that migration spikes housing costs for young American couples.
“The post-pandemic wave of migration has coincided with rising house prices … the rise in costs makes housing less affordable for natives,” The Economist admitted in a March 13 article, adding:
A meta-analysis by William Cochrane and Jacques Poot, both of the University of Waikato, finds that a 1% increase in the migrant population of a city lead to a 0.5-1% rise in rents. Another study, by Umut Unal of the Czech Research Institute for Labour and Social Affairs and co-authors, estimates that a 1% rise in migration to a German district leads to a 3% rise in house prices. James Cabral and Walter Steingress, both of the Bank of Canada, calculate that a 1% increase in an American county’s population raises median rents by 2.2% … the rise in costs makes housing less affordable for natives.
Vance repeatedly spotlighted the issue during the 2024 election, and on March 10, Vance told the National League of Cities’ Congressional City Conference:
If you allow 20 million people to compete with American citizens for the cost of homes, you are going to have a large and, frankly, completely preventable spike in the demand for housing. And that is what we, of course, have seen. Because while we made it a little bit hard to build homes in this country over the last four years, we’ve also unfortunately made it way too easy for people to compete against American citizens for the precious homes that are in our country to begin with.
“The Economist concedes the obvious: immigration drives up housing costs,” responded Steven Camarata, the research chief at the Center for Immigration Studies.
The obvious is increasingly undeniable in countries where governments have been importing migrants to help inflate the local economy, including the United States under border chief Alejandro Mayorkas, as well as Australia, Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
While the magazine admits the housing spike, Camarota said, “It stops there although we know that [higher housing costs] has consequences for family formation and native fertility.”
The magazine article engages in a similar form of mental crime-stop when it talks about migration’s impact on wages.
For example, the article admits that migrants help cut wages for citizens when it says, “Without migration, the state would have to raise pay to attract, say, [citizen] care workers—and probably for all workers, not just new ones.”
But then the article’s author insists the wage loss is small, saying, “A range of empirical research supported the idea that any reduction in natives’ wages from migration was either small or non-existent.”
Camarota rejected the claim of small effects, noting that the famous 2016 study on immigration and wages — which was cited by The Economist — hid the negative data behind a deceptively positive press release. “The report had 16 studies that showed negative effects on wages … If you look at the actual report, it’s much more negative about wages,” Camarota said. “And who’s to say what is ‘small’” he added.
The main purpose of the article is to claim that even low-skilled migration is profitable for nations, partly because even unskilled migrants generate taxes. It declares that “immigration raises the average income of natives … The indirect fiscal benefit amounts to roughly $750 per year for a low-skilled American worker.”
“I don’t take at all seriously anything that says migration is a net fiscal benefit,” responded Camarota. “It’s so counterintuitive and so counter to all the data that we have.”
For example, the article refuses to acknowledge the huge difference in welfare payments to educated migrants versus unskilled migrants, he said, adding, “68 percent of households headed by immigrants who have only a high school education use one of the major welfare programs,” he said.
That willingness to hide the obvious extra costs of lower-skilled migrants shows The Economist‘s political bias, said Camarota:
To argue for more immigration is to be fundamentally deceptive [to citizens]. Countries don’t want it, so the only way [for The Economist and its peers] to do it is to trick them. Tell them it’ll be temporary. Tell them it’s humanitarian. Tell them that it isn’t as big as they seem. But the reality is, you have to push it down their throats.
That is a kind of elitism that is reminiscent of the Gilded Age [1870s to 1890s] when immigration was also very high … It represents a kind of preference for the foreign [migrants] and a lack of empathy, a lack of concern, a lack of commitment to their fellow citizens
The author at The Economist “is one of these people who want to have it both ways” on migration, he said, adding:
[They say migration has] no effect on wages and yet it also helps to lower costs and increase investment. But if it doesn’t have an [downward] effect on wages, then it doesn’t improve things for employers or investors or consumers.
When it comes to immigration, they’re always going out to talk out of both sides of their mouths. They say [new immigration] doesn’t have any effect on wages … and then when you want to send immigrants home, they say [the deportations are] going to cause wages to spike and cause inflation.
Under President Joe Biden, 300 million blue-collar and white-collar Americans lost power in the labor and housing markets, and they lost much workplace investment, productivity, and training once enabled by employers. For example, many college graduates lost career opportunities as Biden’s deputies expanded the inflow of white-collar workers, such as H-1B visa workers.
Citizens also lost civic stability to government-imposed social diversity, and they lost political power to the expanding blocs of ethnic voters who demand benefits for their particular communities, cultures, and home countries.
Americans also grew disgusted at the government’s migration policy as spent billions of dollars to extract human resources from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy, regardless of the massive loss of life among migrants and Americans, or the huge damage to the sending countries.
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