The “easing” of rental prices coincides with a slowdown of illegal and legal immigration to the United States, the Wall Street Journal admits.
The Wall Street Journal piece, titled “Renters Have the Upper Hand. And They Are Probably Keeping It,” details rent prices dropping across the United States as the market is tilted toward renters rather than landlords.
Immigration, the Journal admits, has played at least some role in rent dropping, as less demand has decreased housing prices:
Renters across much of the U.S. have enjoyed easing prices and months of free rent this year. Now, this tenant-friendly environment looks poised to extend deep into next year, and perhaps beyond. [Emphasis added]
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Remote workers who once helped power the Sunbelt’s population boom are getting called back to the office. And as President Trump cracks down on international immigration, the influx of new foreign residents is also slowing. [Emphasis added]
Vice President JD Vance has credited housing costs finally stabilizing to President Donald Trump’s low-immigration approach to boost quality of life, lower home prices, open jobs for Americans, and tackle crime.
“Why has housing leveled off over the last six months? I really believe the main driver is you’ve had negative net migration into the United States for the first time in 60 years in this country,” Vance recently said.
“You cannot flood the United States of America with 20, 30, 40 million people who have no legal right to be here, have them compete against young American families for homes, and not expect the price to skyrocket. It’s simple supply and demand,” Vance said. “You increase the demand, they increase the price.”
Indeed, under former President Joe Biden, the nation’s foreign-born population grew by an unprecedented nearly 7 million in just 4 years. Meanwhile, in the first 6 months of the Trump administration, the foreign-born population has dropped by 2.2 million — about 1.6 million of whom were illegal aliens.
Decades of research have shown the correlation between mass immigration and skyrocketing housing costs.
Last year during a congressional hearing, Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota told Congress that “a 5-percentage-point increase in the recent immigrant share of a metro area’s population is associated with a 12-percent increase in the average U.S.-born household’s rent, relative to their income.”
“Adding very large numbers of people to the country must significantly impact housing prices by driving up demand for rental properties … the Census Bureau reports that the increase in rents in 2023 was by far the largest in the past decade,” Camarota said.
In 2013, a study by the Michael Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, which promotes mass immigration, explained how the importing of tens of millions of immigrants over decades had helped raise housing costs by $3.7 trillion for the next generation of homebuyers, but spun the figure as the creation of “housing wealth.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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