Bloomberg: Migration Drives Up Housing Costs in 13 Countries

Migration is expanding per-person poverty in many advanced countries, chiefly by raising housing costs, said Bloomberg, a pro-migration business magazine.

“All up, thirteen economies [with high immigration] across the developed world were in per-capita [per-person] recessions at the end of last year, according to exclusive analysis by Bloomberg Economics,” the publication reported May 5:

While there are other factors — such as the shift to less-productive service jobs [instead of manufacturing] and the fact that new arrivals [migrants] typically earn less — housing shortages and associated cost-of-living strains are a common thread.

The countries damaged by this immigration process include Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and Britain, said the article, which tried to blame the housing prices on a “lack of [housing] supply,” not on excessive migration. For example, in the United Kingdom, it said:

A shortage of properties for the bigger population has sent house prices to over eight times average earnings in England and Wales, and 12 times in London. In 1997, they were 3.5 times earnings and four times, respectively. A lack of supply has also caused rental costs to rocket at a record pace in the last 12 months, worsening a cost-of-living crisis for young Britons especially.

Breitbart News reported on May 6 that younger U.S. workers are losing hope of ever buying homes amid President Joe Biden’s massive inflow of roughly 10 million lower-skilled legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants:

Pessimism among renters about the ability to ever own a home is worsening, with the expectations of someday owning a home falling to a new all-time low, a survey released Monday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed.

The average probability of buying a home, according to renters in the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations, fell to 40.1 percent. That’s down from 44.4 percent a year ago and the lowest in records stretching back a decade.

In high-migration Germany, “industrial productivity is declining at a shocking annual pace of 5 per cent,” the Financial Times reported May 6:

Worse, high housing costs are reducing birth rates, Bloomberg noted:

[Indian-born Akanksha] Biswas [lives in Canada and] spends more than a third of her income on the monthly rent bill of C$2,800 ($2,050), splitting the cost with her partner. She’s dining out less and making coffee at home instead of going to the cafe. She’s also pushing back plans to have children or buy a home. “I don’t see my future here if I want to raise a family,” she says.

But the fix for the damage caused by migration is more migration, said Bloomberg, which is written for investors who gain from a larger population:

The longer voters in the UK, Australia, Canada and similar economies see their living standards go backwards, the more their opposition to rapid immigration programs will harden. A lasting fix requires government policies, especially in housing, that convince both would-be migrants and the existing populations of the benefits of immigration-led economic growth.

The extra immigrants will be used to build housing for current migrants, Bloomberg said. “Skills shortages across much of the developed world mean more, not fewer, workers are needed,” said the article, which is headlined “Global Housing Shortages Are Crushing Immigration-Fueled Growth.”

Yet public opinion is running against more migration, lamented Bloomberg. “Immigration shapes up as a defining issue in the November presidential election,” said the article. Bloomberg News is owned by Michael Bloomberg, who is a prominent advocate for more migration.

Few politicians have noted the problem. But GOP Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) spotlighting the role of migration in rising home costs:

Bloomberg’s admission comes as more economic elites admit that migration is impoverishing Western families and diverting investment from industry — even as China’s emphasis on automation and workplace productivity is expanding its economic clout and employees’ wages.

“All the available evidence indicates that China’s remarkable export performance is driven by manufacturing productivity due to investment in robotics and AI applications,” said David Goldman, an author at Asia Times.

“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at an April 29 event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:

 These countries [such as China and Japan] will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology … If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.

“Many policymakers have recently argued that migration is helping contain price rises by relieving labour shortages … Yet the evidence is weak and may, in fact, point in the opposite direction, the Economist magazine said on April 30. It added:

Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of rental housing, which is in short supply across the anglosphere. Research by Goldman Sachs, a bank, suggests that in Australia each 100,000 increase in annual net overseas migration boosts rents by about 1%.

In the United States, “abundant labor coming across the border” is reducing the wages paid to Americans, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said in April.

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