President Donald Trump posted about a Federal Reserve draft paper on his social media platform as proof on how unauthorized immigration contributed to home price growth during Biden era, a matter he has pressed on several times over the years.
A newly surfaced Federal Reserve working paper indicating that unauthorized immigration contributed to U.S. housing cost increases from 2021 to 2024 has become the center of a national policy debate.
The study, conducted by economists Daniel Wilson of the San Francisco Fed and Xiaoqing Zhou of the Dallas Fed, shows a systematic analysis tracking the local economic effects of an unprecedented migration boom that added an estimated seven million people to the U.S. population.
They utilized restricted immigration court data and administrative records to determine that an influx of unauthorized workers equal to 1% of a local workforce raised area home prices by 2.2 % and rents by 1.4 %.
READ: Trump cancels signing of bipartisan affordable housing bill despite passing at Congress (June 24, 2026)
Trump specifically emphasized the percentage increase of home prices the illegal immigrant wave caused. “Fed Reserve working paper suggests Biden illegal immigrant wave drove up home prices 30%,” he wrote citing the research paper.
However, the figures promoted by the administration appear exaggerated compared to the paper’s findings. The data demonstrates that unauthorized immigration accounted for roughly 30% of the growth in home prices within an average metropolitan area over the three-year period but not a 30% increase in the overall cost of a home.
Across those average markets, total home prices climbed by 22.4%, which means the migration influx contributed roughly 6.6% to total home price appreciation.
Furthermore, because unauthorized immigrants were heavily clustered in a handful of major metropolitan areas, their impact on the typical American real estate market was notably smaller.
In those typical markets, the influx accounted for approximately 13% of home-price growth and 9% of rental-rate growth, according to the study.
READ: U.S. Senate passes bipartisan housing bill aimed at improving affordability (March 13, 2026)
The economists identified the underlying issue of the price increases as a classic supply-and-demand mismatch rather than legal status. When sudden arrival of new residents occurred in regional housing markets, the residential construction failed to react accordingly or expand to absorb the sudden demand.
The research also outlined broader local economic tradeoffs that challenge single-issue narratives. The same unauthorized inflows that escalated local housing costs simultaneously expanded local employment roughly one-for-one, showing no detectable downward pressure on baseline local wages.
Additionally, the study noted a sharp reduction in safety-net expenditures flowing to those areas, a trend consistent with working-age arrivals holding jobs while remaining legally ineligible for major federal public assistance programs, including unemployment insurance, food assistance, and Medicaid.