Former President Donald Trump says record illegal immigration to the United States on President Joe Biden’s watch has sent rents and housing costs skyrocketing for Americans.
During a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday evening, Trump focused on the Biden administration’s transformation of the United States-Mexico border into a European-style checkpoint where tens of thousands of migrants cross every couple of weeks, are briefly detained, and then released into the nation’s interior.
“In total, crooked Joe has imported more illegal aliens than the populations of 40 out of 50 states,” Trump said. “This is unsustainable.”
The result, Trump said, is sky-high rents and housing costs for America’s working and middle class who must compete with a growing number of foreign-born residents for limited apartments and affordable homes.
“Housing costs are skyrocketing, absolutely skyrocketing, because we have 15 million new migrants. We have no place to put them. We have no place to put them, and that number is growing so that we have absolutely no place,” Trump said:
If Joe Biden wins this election, he wants to turn every single illegal alien he let charge across our borders into a voting citizen. By contrast, I want to send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home, where they belong … Biden wants an invasion — I want a deportation. [Emphasis added]
Indeed, despite high interest rates, home prices have been out of reach for most Americans.
The latest data from Realtor.com reveals that in the last five years, home prices have increased more than 52 percent. In New York City, where hundreds of thousands of migrants have resettled under Biden, home prices per square foot have increased almost 85 percent since 2019.
Research from JPMorgan published in March directly tied mass immigration under Biden to a tightening housing market where limited supply and expanded demand have driven up costs.
“Immigration has added 3.3 million people to the U.S. population in 2023 and 2024,” Business Insider reports. “… [JPMorgan] notes that the immigration wave is also straining housing supply.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), reportedly a top vice presidential contender for Trump, has been at the forefront of mass immigration’s impact on housing prices for Americans.
Last year, Vance testified at a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing that such record levels of immigration “put incredible pressure” on the nation’s housing market.
“You have way more buyers for way fewer homes, and that puts incredible pressure on home buyers and people who just want to live a good life,” Vance said:
Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban AffairsI’m a very strong believer that we should think about our immigration problem and our immigration crisis as an economic problem as much as a cultural or law and order problem. [Emphasis added]
Trump’s and Vance’s assertions that high levels of immigration increase housing prices is widely accepted by the establishment media.
New York Magazine, for example, reported last year that mass immigration is “bad for housing prices” while Axios reported that such levels of immigration under Biden have made the U.S. housing market “worse.”
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
