From FactCheck.org:
Vice President JD Vance has exaggerated the increase in home prices during President Joe Biden’s time in office and has misleadingly pointed to illegal immigration as a primary cause of a rise in prices.
In a Fox News interview on Nov. 13, Vance said that “the price of a new home literally doubled” under Biden. But home sales price measures show at most a 37% increase. Vance appears to be referring to an increase in the monthly cost of new homes, an increase that factors in a rise in mortgage rates.
In that interview and in a Dec. 2 Cabinet meeting, Vance pointed to illegal immigration as a primary cause. “Why did homes get so unaffordable?” he said in the Cabinet meeting. “Because we had 20 million illegal aliens in this country taking homes that ought by right to go to American citizens,” he said, using an exaggerated figure.
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According to federal data, home prices increased during the Biden administration, but not nearly as much as Vance claimed. The Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development data show there was a 21.1% increase in the median sales price of new homes, rising from $354,800 in January 2021 to $429,600 in January 2025.
The National Association of Realtors’ seasonally adjusted annual sales figures show a similar trend for existing single-family homes. In 2024, the national median price was $412,500, a 37.4% increase from 2020, the year before Biden took office.
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“There are a couple of things going on,” Vigdor said. “Demographically, birth rates are falling and the population is aging, which will naturally reduce the number of young families looking to purchase a home. That softens the demand side.” He added that “buyers may also be waiting for interest rates to come down, or for macroeconomic uncertainty associated with tariffs and other Trump administration initiatives to resolve.”
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“I reported that every immigrant entering a local housing market, which I defined as a county, raises home values by about 11.6 cents,” Vigdor, who released a study in 2013 examining the link between immigration and housing prices, explained in an email. Using the Pew Research Center estimate for the unauthorized population, Vigdor estimated “32,000 unauthorized immigrants in the ‘typical’ American housing market, which suggests a boost to home values of under $4,000, or less than 1% of the current median sales price in the US.”
Steven A. Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports lower levels of immigration, said in September 2024 testimony to Congress that immigration was driving an increase in demand for rental housing. His analysis, he said, “indicates that a 5-percentage point increase in the recent immigrant share of a metro area’s population is associated with a 12 percent increase in the average U.S.-born household’s rent, relative to their income.” He noted that this was “only a simple correlation and does not include homeowners. Much more detailed analysis would be necessary to confirm this relationship.”
Other experts acknowledge that immigration overall plays a role in the supply and demand of housing, but they also point to larger factors driving home prices in recent years.
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Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, also pushed back against Vance’s assertions. “It is misplaced to blame immigration for the runup in house prices since the pandemic,” he told us in an email, noting that “[m]ost new immigrants rent” and the construction industry is “more dependent” than any other “on immigrant workers.”
Frost’s analysis also said that immigrants are strong contributors to the housing supply side as they accounted for 34% of construction trade jobs in 2023, based on Census data.
“The recent flat house prices are unrelated to less immigration, as immigrants generally don’t own homes,” said Zandi, whose work was frequently referenced by the Biden administration. “However, affordability remains a problem given high mortgage rates and the previous runup in house prices, rising homeowner insurance rates, and property taxes.”
