Vance amplifies immigration-housing cost link

Vice President Vance made his pitch for local municipalities to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement last week in an address to the National League of Cities’ Congressional City Conference in Washington, D.C. Vance talked about the strain that unsustainable immigration over the last four years has put on local resources, hospitals, and schools. The core of his speech, however, concerned a subject he has spoken about before – the intersection between immigration and housing:

“If you allow 20 million people to compete with American citizens for the cost of homes, you are going to have a large and, frankly, completely preventable spike in the demand for housing. And that is what we, of course, have seen. Because while we made it a little bit hard to build homes in this country over the last four years, we’ve also, unfortunately, made it way too easy for people to compete against American citizens for the precious homes that are in our country to begin with.”

This is the kind of thing that media explainers will be paid to deny but regular people can see without the Vice President of the United States (or NumbersUSA!) pointing it out. Vance specifically appealed to the leaders of sanctuary cities to cooperate with immigration enforcement as a means to make life more affordable for legal residents.

My colleague Eric Ruark estimates that the United States adds a new resident about every 20 seconds, and most of that is driven by immigration. After the biggest four-year surge in immigration (legal and illegal) in American history, every policymaker should be asking:

How does mass immigration help bring sidelined Americans back into the labor force?
How does mass immigration help conserve the American landscape?
How does mass immigration help reduce income inequality?
How does mass immigration help ease traffic congestion?
How does mass immigration help with water shortages?
How does mass immigration help lower housing costs?

Factsheet: Immigration and Housing

My colleague Andre Barnes wrote about immigration and homelessness recently in the Washington Stand:

“Homelessness is connected to housing shortages and housing shortages can be directly traced to mass immigration — legal and illegal. More people means more competition for housing and an increase in rent, especially at the low end of the economic ladder. Incredibly, a 5% increase in population can lead to a 12% increase in housing costs.”

Vance sounded like my colleague Andrew Good when he talked about immigration hitting Americans with the double whammy of depressed wages and inflated housing costs, both of which are partly a result of an immigration policy that has been running at twice the recommended rate for the past half century. This is economics 101: adding 8 million people increases the supply of workers, which lowers the cost of labor (wages); adding 8 million people increases the demand for housing, which increases the cost to rent or own.

“It’s actually not just an American problem, either,” Vance told his audience of municipal leaders. “If you go to Canada, where because of their laws and regulations, they’ve seen a massive increase in the number of people who have come into their country. You go to the United Kingdom, you go across the world, and you see a very consistent relationship between a massive increase in immigration and a massive increase in housing prices.”

Supply and demand works in other countries, too! I don’t mean to make light of Vance’s obvious point so much as lament that we find ourselves in a place where the obvious cannot be taken for granted. After all, this is serious business. Nobody’s idea of the American dream is a world where it takes nearly two times the average American family’s income to afford a home.

“Not the [income of the] average American worker,” clarified Vance, “but the combined incomes of a husband and wife. And that’s just not acceptable or sustainable in the United States of America.”

Current immigration policy is not sustainable. Nor is it fair or credible. A better policy requires:

• Stopping illegal immigration; and
• Lowering legal immigration

Check in on your Members of Congress to see where they can do more.