Housing affordability remains a national political flashpoint as economists, federal agencies and elected officials debate what has pushed prices and rents higher since 2021. On July 6, former acting ICE Director Jonathan Fahey brought that debate back to immigration policy, telling Fox Business that Americans were the “losers” in the housing market under former President Joe Biden’s border approach.
Fahey points to Dallas Fed paper and Fox Business interview
Fahey made the remarks Monday, July 6, during an appearance on “Mornings With Maria,” according to Fox Business. In that interview, he said Biden-era immigration policy increased demand for housing and other services, arguing that “the American people overall are the losers on illegal migration,” while some industries benefited from the larger labor supply.
Fox Business said Fahey was referring to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper that studied unauthorized immigration between 2021 and 2024. The paper found that an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows equal to 1% of a local area’s initial employment was associated with a 2.2% increase in local home prices and a 1.4% increase in local rents over the period studied.
The Dallas Fed paper also found that the same inflows raised overall employment by about 1%, while showing no evidence that the immigration surge reduced average wages across the broader labor market. The authors said the report is a preliminary draft circulated for professional comment and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.
Fahey told Fox Business that the housing effect was “common sense,” arguing that a rapid population increase adds pressure in a market already constrained by limited supply. His comments added a political interpretation to an economic paper that has quickly become part of a broader national argument over immigration, wages and affordability.
The Fox Business segment and the Dallas Fed paper discussed national immigration trends, not one single city or state. What is confirmed is that the researchers measured local labor and housing outcomes across metro areas during the 2021 to 2024 period; what is not publicly detailed in the segment is a full market-by-market list showing which individual communities saw the largest effect.
That matters for local readers because housing pressure is not uniform. The Congressional Budget Office has said added immigration boosts demand for housing and that the effect on prices and rents is larger in places where supply is constrained by zoning, land-use rules or geography.
The Washington Post reported that the Fed working paper found unauthorized arrivals clustered in a limited number of large cities, meaning the effect in the typical U.S. market was smaller than the headline figures might suggest. That reporting said the paper estimated the inflow accounted for about 13% of home-price growth and 9% of rent growth in the average market studied.
For residents trying to understand what this means locally, the current evidence supports one narrow conclusion: immigration-driven demand was one factor in housing costs in some metro areas. It does not, by itself, establish that immigration was the only or dominant cause of affordability problems in every community.
The larger context is that immigration has been affecting both the housing market and the labor market at the same time. The Congressional Budget Office said the recent immigration surge increased consumer spending, raised residential investment and expanded the labor force, while also putting downward pressure on some wages in the near term by increasing the number of workers.
CBO also said those effects are uneven. For workers with lower levels of education, wage growth slowed from 2024 to 2026 in its estimates because the increase in similarly educated workers added competition, while broader economic output and federal revenues rose because of the larger population and workforce.
The Dallas Fed paper adds a more specific housing estimate to that debate, but its authors framed the findings as draft research rather than a final institutional conclusion. That distinction is important because the paper measures statistical relationships during a defined period and does not rule out other major drivers of housing inflation, including high mortgage rates, limited inventory and local building constraints.
For homeowners, renters and would-be buyers, the practical takeaway is that the affordability debate is increasingly being shaped by immigration data alongside interest rates and supply shortages. As of July 2026, federal researchers and political figures are still interpreting the same surge through different lenses: as a source of added housing demand, a larger workforce and a still-unfinished policy argument over who benefited and who paid more.