Fed note links Biden immigration wave to 30% home price spike
One side wants mass removals to cool rents fast; the other blames Wall Street buyers and zoning walls instead.
A Federal Reserve analysis tied the recent surge in illegal immigration under Biden to roughly 30% higher home prices and 20% higher rents. Dale Partridge argues deportations would ease shortages, cut crime and lift native birth rates. Chancy Luck counters that corporate investors and chronic under-building are the real drivers.
Why these scores — The Fed regression supplies a verifiable coefficient; Partridge extrapolates policy effects beyond the paper’s scope while Luck reframes the question around investor share without testing the migration term directly. No obvious bot clusters, just standard partisan quote-mining of one chart.
A single Fed chart put 30% price growth next to net migration numbers and the replies split in two directions at once.
Partridge’s camp treats the correlation as near-causal: remove the new arrivals and vacancies appear, prices soften, and long-term demographic pressure eases. Luck’s replies insist the same data set shows investor purchases and local zoning rules explain far more of the variance once you control for units actually permitted.
Both sides cite the same underlying paper yet stop reading at the paragraph that flatters their prior. The raw migration coefficient is there; so are the footnotes on supply elasticity and institutional ownership.
Mass removals would free up housing stock quickly, reduce wage pressure in low-skill sectors, and eventually support higher native birth rates.
- @dalepartridge✓ verified“Mass deportations would immediately improve housing market, lower crime and raise American birth rates.”
Corporate bulk buying plus local building restrictions keep supply tight regardless of how many people cross the border.
- @chancy_luck✓ verified“Housing costs driven by corporate investment and supply shortages, not immigration levels.”
Read it straight — Pull the original Fed regression, check the exact controls used, and test whether adding investor-purchase data changes the immigration coefficient size.