Fed Working Paper Links Biden-Era Immigration Surge to 30% Home Price Rise
A Federal Reserve working paper quantifying housing costs against immigration levels adds an empirical data point to a politically charged debate, though causal claims in working papers are...
A Federal Reserve working paper has found that the record increase in illegal immigration during the Biden administration was associated with a roughly 30 percent rise in home prices and a 20 percent increase in rents, according to reporting by the New York Post on July 5, 2026, citing the paper directly. The Federal Reserve working paper series publishes preliminary research that has not completed the institution's full internal review process; the findings represent the authors' views and not official Fed policy.
The paper's publication arrives as housing affordability remains a central concern across the political spectrum. The U.S. Census Bureau's most recent American Community Survey data show median home prices and median gross rents reached multi-decade highs between 2021 and 2023, a period that overlapped with elevated irregular border crossings recorded by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in its publicly available enforcement statistics.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a total of approximately 2.4 million southwest border encounters in fiscal year 2023, the highest annual figure in records maintained by the agency. Economists studying housing markets generally attribute price movements to multiple overlapping factors, including mortgage interest rates, housing supply constraints, construction labor costs, and demographic shifts — variables whose relative weights the Fed working paper's methodology would need to isolate to establish causation rather than correlation.
Republican lawmakers have previously cited elevated border crossing figures as a driver of housing cost pressures, a position reflected in legislative language attached to the Fiscal Responsibility Act debates of 2023. Democratic housing policy advocates have countered that restrictive local zoning laws and underinvestment in affordable housing construction are primary structural drivers, citing data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition's annual Gap reports.
Several factual questions remain unanswered by currently available public records. The specific regression methodology, control variables, and authorship of the Fed working paper had not been independently confirmed through the Federal Reserve's official working paper repository as of the date of this report. The full paper, once publicly posted at federalreserve.gov or the Social Science Research Network, would provide the dataset, coefficient estimates, and confidence intervals necessary to evaluate the strength and scope of the reported associations.