Tame Establishment Media on Housing Costs: Don’t Mention Migration!

President Joe Biden has imposed a huge migration tax on young Americans’ housing costs, but his tame media allies are hiding the evidence.

“A shortage of housing, inflation, and high interest rates are squeezing renters around the country and pricing out potential home buyers,” the Washington Post told its readers on May 28 under the headline “Skyrocketing rents and home prices may be pivotal in the 2024 election.”

The New York Times provided its readers the same don’t-blame-Biden’s-migration theme on May 27 with the vague headline, “America’s Affordable Housing Crisis”:

President Biden worries about high housing costs … Tens of millions of families, across red and blue states, struggle with rent and home prices. The reason is a longstanding housing shortage.

But senior bankers, tax collectors, and business publications admit the obvious to each other: Migration makes it harder for Americans to rent or buy because it spikes housing demand, spurs inflation, and raises interest rates.

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari, told the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper on May 29:

We under-built after the great financial crisis, we under-built homes in the US for more than a decade. So there’s a shortage of homes. And then you have an increased demand for housing after Covid … And then we have a big surge in immigration in the last few years. They obviously need a place to live.

The reporters’ coverup is not surprising, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, adding:

It’s like it’s a taboo … I’ve seen them going through ridiculous contortions to avoid blaming Biden for the border crisis he caused … [for example, they blame] bad harvests caused by climate change. They’re going through contortions to avoid actually discussing the cause of it, because that would mean they agree with Republicans.

Migration and Housing Costs 

Since early 2021, Biden has encouraged and welcomed a massive inflow of roughly 10 million legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants.

That is roughly one immigrant for every American born during his term. That massive inflow has inflated rents and housing prices.

In turn, rising housing costs boost national inflation rates which then force up mortgage rates and the monthly mortgage payments.

For example, a housing cost index for 20 cities climbed 7.4 percent year from March 2023 to March 2024, according to data released late May.

That is Biden’s triple immigration punch to the face of many American families: lower wages, higher prices, and higher mortgage payments that have doubled from roughly $1,400 in January 2021 up to almost $2,800 in April 2024.

That adds up to a migration-related Biden housing tax of $14,400 per year that the media describe as something above and beyond Biden’s influence.

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The impact of migration can be seen in national maps of housing prices. For example, the Washington Post produced a useful map on May 14 that showed a sharp 12.7 percent jump in housing prices in the once-quiet town of Whitewater, Wisconsin. Under Biden, the town and its surrounding farms have been flooded by at least 1,000 migrants.

Housing prices in Hammond, Indiana, have jumped by 7.2 percent in one year as migrants shared cramped housing to take nearby jobs for lower wages.

The impact of migration is especially tough in cities because many illegal and quasi-legal migrants want higher urban wages and are willing to offset the higher rents by sharing apartments and beds. For example, a landlord can get more profit by renting to 12 hard-working, rent-sharing migrants than to one middle-class American family. Similarly, Americans flee from high-migration districts by competing for housing in adjacent districts.

Biden’s migration has many victims in addition to Biden’s 2024 campaign. The Post article described Nevada:

LAS VEGAS — D. Carter paid $1,525 for rent, cable and WiFi for her one-bedroom apartment until her monthly rent jumped to $2,100 last year.

Unwilling and unable to pay the new rate, Carter, who spoke on the condition that her first name not be used, considered buying but quickly realized that with interest rates hovering around 7 percent, she was priced out. She found a new apartment in a decent part of town after months of searching, but said she still pays up to 50 percent of her fluctuating $50,000 to $70,000 income from her banking job for rent.

Housing is largely a local issue, yet it’s presenting a challenging and complex problem in Nevada and other battleground states with implications for this year’s race between President Biden and former president Donald Trump.

But he damage is quietly admitted by media outlets and banks that serve businesses.

“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 [an] exclusive analysis by Bloomberg Economics,” the publication reported on May 5, adding:

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.

“Global Migration Boom Keeps Housing Costs High: Surging immigration is boosting rents and supporting home prices, complicating inflation flight,” said the headline above a July 2023 article in the Wall Street Journal. The report cited a May study by Goldman Sachs, which said in an email that “rebounding immigration” is helping investors by bumping up housing prices:

[A] post-pandemic recovery in immigration appears to be boosting population growth, thereby lifting housing demand and limiting house price downside (Exhibit 5). This dynamic appears especially important in Canada and Australia, where immigration and population growth have rebounded most strongly.

Housing in the 2024 Election

The damage is so great that Biden’s allies are worried for his 2024 chances.

“Immigration shapes up as a defining issue in the November presidential election,” lamented Bloomberg’s writers.

“It is a first-tier issue almost everywhere,” admitted Shaun Donovan, who worked as housing secretary for President Barack Obama. “That is changing the national politics around it in a way that I think is quite different than I’ve ever seen,” he told the AP.

“This will deeply impact voters’ sense of the economy,” Wall Street analyst Mark Zandi told the AP. But back in 2016, he denounced Trump because he planned migration cuts would lower the cost of housing by 4 percent in 2018 and 2019.

But establishment media sites are trying to keep the public in the dark by avoiding any mention of Biden’s migration in articles about housing costs.

RELATED: Seattle Police Arrest Leftist Protesters Demanding Housing for Migrants, Refugees

“The United States is slogging through a housing affordability crisis that was decades in the making,” the Associated Press told its nationwide readers on March 15. “That’s like the biggest problem for Biden because it’s not one that he can solve,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at the brokerage Redfin insisted to the AP.

Reporters in the establishment media cannot cover the issue, said Krikorian. “It’s sort of a superstition not to invoke the term “immigration,” like as if you’re saying Beetlejuice three times, then Beetlejuice shows up,” Krikorian said.

“They’re afraid if they say immigration in an article … something bad will happen to them, or the great unwashed deplorables will do some terrible xenophobic thing,” he laughed.

But many reporters and editors leave faint traces of the unnamable term in their articles. For example, the AP reporter hinted at migration with his sentence: “At the root of this problem: America failed to build enough homes for its growing population.”