A new Brookings Institution report concedes that the historic wave of migration admitted under former President Joe Biden reduced wages for workers overall and drove up rents nationwide.
According to the report, the influx of migrants “may have reduced average wages of all workers by as much as 1.5%, likely in part because immigrants took lower-wage jobs.” The report notes that U.S.-born workers’ wages rose 0.9% overall and that native-born employment was roughly unchanged.
The report also found that the demand for housing created by new immigrants pushed rents up between 1.4% and 1.6%.
“Housing demand generated by the new immigrants caused rents to rise by 1.4 to 1.6%, the paper finds, but native renters’ wages rose by more, increasing at least 1.6% net of the rent increase.”
Despite those numbers, Brookings researchers framed the migration surge as a net benefit for Americans overall.
The Biden administration’s immigration policies produced the largest mass migration by a one-term president in American history, and the Brookings findings add to a growing body of research documenting its economic fallout on ordinary Americans.
In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas released its own findings on the same period, tracing housing price growth from early 2021 to early 2024 back in part to the surge in population driven by immigration.
“… we find that during the boom period an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows [UIWF] equal to 1% of a local area’s initial employment increased local house prices by 2.2% and increased local rents by 1.4%.”
The Dallas Fed calculated that unauthorized immigrant worker flows could explain about 30% of the total growth in house prices and 20% of the total growth in rents over the boom period in the average local market.
A Department of Housing and Urban Development investigation published last year reached a similar conclusion, finding that the mass arrival of migrants under Biden drove up housing costs for low-income Americans who do not receive public assistance.
Taken together, the reports — one from a left-leaning think tank, one from a regional Federal Reserve bank, and one from a federal agency — point to the same conclusion: the policies that brought millions of migrants into the country came with a direct cost to American workers’ wages and their rent.
