Migration is helping to wreck the nation’s housing market and impose huge costs on young Americans, investor Peter Thiel told the Free Press news site.
“The way I model what’s happened in the U.S., in Britain, Canada, a lot of the Anglosphere countries is a … real estate catastrophe,” said Thiel, a billionaire who made his fortune in Silicon Valley by creating Paypal and other Internet-based companies.
Even small migration inflows can cause large increases in housing costs, especially in districts where there is little construction, Thiel said, adding:
There’s ways I can describe this in Los Angeles, where we live, all sorts of places where the real estate prices, the rents have gone up more and more. If we talk about the inflation problem, it was inflation and immigration. There’s a way you could talk about inflation in terms of the prices of eggs or groceries, but that’s not that big a cost item, even for lower middle class people. The really big cost item is the rent. I think in some ways, [President Donald] Trump and [Sen.] JD Vance did manage to shift the conversation a little bit to this real estate problem. Again, I don’t want to blame it all on immigration, but if you just add more people to the mix and you’re not allowed to build new houses because of zoning laws, or it’s too expensive, or it’s too regulated and restricted, then the prices go up a lot.
It’s this incredible wealth transfer from the young and the lower middle class to the upper middle class and the landlords and the old. There are reasons you might not want to do that … If you actually think of it in Econ. 101 terms, maybe you don’t want more people competing for your two-bedroom apartment and driving up the rent even more or even more people crowding in and paying money to the landlord.
Breitbart News has closely tracked the growing economic damage caused by government-directed migration, including the vast transfer of wealth from young people to older landlords and investors.
CLAIM: Donald Trump says migrants are increasingly taking American jobs in the United States economy.
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 11, 2024
FACT CHECK: Mostly true. Economic studies have shown for months that migrants are enjoying most of the year-to-year job growth in the labor market. https://t.co/gkJcSCcUot
In the 2024 campaign, Trump won some younger voters by offering the hope that the return of President Joe Biden’s migrants might reduce housing costs.
“It’s all about the American Dream,” Trump told a roomful of business elites and billionaires at the Economic Club of New Yor in September, adding:
We will make housing much more affordable… [and] we will get [mortgage rates] back down to 3 percent … [so] young people will be able to buy a home again and be part of the American dream …. [Democrats] don’t want to talk about the American Dream because they are the exact opposite.
Immigration “is a big driver of housing costs,” Vance told a Detroit audience in October:
The media, they don’t like to talk about the fact that one of the biggest drivers of housing costs, one of the biggest reasons why our young people can’t afford to buy a home is because under Kamala Harris’s leadership, we have let in millions upon millions of people who don’t have any right to be here.
That pitch likely helped shift younger voters to Trump.
Gen Z voters “shifted right from D+24 to D+16 [and] Men under age 30 were R+10,” according to a 9,000-person, election-day exit poll by Cygnal.
Migration’s economic damage is especially high in coastal states, such as Boston and New York.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Tour the Ecological Damage from Mass Migration on Texas Border River
The same process is happening also in Canada, the United Kingdom, and other high-migration nations. In the U.K. for example, migration has pushed housing costs so high that the birth rate has fallen to record lows, prompting calls by business groups for even more migration to replace the missing births.
But editors and reporters at nearly all establishment media outlets twist themselves into pretzels to hide migration’s damage to American housing, families, and birthrates.
However, reality sneaks through in some articles.
“Border concerns, driven as much by real challenges as manufactured ones — and wrapped up with voters’ other worries about the economy, housing prices, and crime — … fueled rightward shifts across the country, pollsters and strategists said,” admitted a post-election, November 15 article at the New York Times.
