New York Magazine admitted this week that mass immigration to the United States is, in fact, “bad for housing prices” for Americans looking for affordable single-family homes.
The admission from the left-wing publication comes as years of research has shown that the nation’s admission of more than a million legal immigrants annually, in addition to millions of illegal aliens, helps send housing prices surging for working- and middle-class Americans.
“Yet one key sector in which immigrants drive higher demand is housing. People need homes,” New York Magazine writer Eric Levitz admitted.
Rather than decreasing overall immigration levels, as most Americans want, Levitz argues that despite mass immigration being “bad for housing prices,” the U.S. ought to make mass immigration “work” by enriching real estate developers with a dismantling of local zoning laws and rapid construction of multi-family complexes in single-family neighborhoods.
“In a world of restrictive zoning and housing scarcity, the nationalist right’s anti-immigrant narrative attains a modicum of plausibility: If the supply of housing units is largely fixed, then allowing immigrants to enter your city will reduce the housing security of the native-born,” Levitz writes:
This insight should not lead us to abandon large-scale immigration, however, but to facilitate housing development. As a matter of ethics and economics, the United States must increase legal immigration. Since our nation’s population is aging, a shrinking share of prime-age workers will need to support a growing share of retirees in the coming decades. At the same time, the working-age population of sub-Saharan Africa is set to grow by 700 million by mid-century and that of Latin America and the Caribbean by 40 million. [Emphasis added]
When housing construction fails to match population growth, massive immigration imposes burdens on ordinary people. As recent events in New York make clear, that will create political difficulties in even the most cosmopolitan of areas. [Emphasis added]
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, both proponents of mass immigration, have made similar admissions in recent months.
While reporting on Canada’s surge in housing prices, both establishment publications detailed how the skyrocketing costs have coincided with the nation’s insistence to import millions of immigrants — all of whom need housing.
“Immigration into Canada is on pace to hit a record high in 2022, but the intake has run into a bottleneck: not enough homes,” the Journal noted in October 2022.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has similarly called out the issue of mass immigration driving up home prices for Americans, telling Breitbart News that the policy of importing millions annually is akin to “economic warfare.”
Illegal immigration is theft, plain and simple. It steals wages from American workers, and drives up the cost of housing and food for our families. Many in the GOP establishment who howl about illegal immigration in public defend cheap labor in private. https://t.co/PJrZwyj2DR
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) May 10, 2023
“Think of the effects that this has on working Americans’ wages to have 10 million more people who shouldn’t be here competing for jobs,” Vance said. “Think about what this does for housing prices, when you have to house 10 million people that shouldn’t be here, that drives up the costs of housing when interest rates are already through the roof.”
“This is economic warfare and theft of the American dream from American citizens, that is the big problem here and that’s why we have to keep fighting it,” he continued.
In 2013, a study by the Michael Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, which promotes mass immigration, explained how the importing of tens of millions of immigrants over decades had helped raise housing costs by $3.7 trillion for the next generation of homebuyers but spun the figure as the creation of “housing wealth.”
“The 40 million immigrants in the United States represent a powerful purchasing class — reflected by their demand for housing, as well as for other locally produced goods and services — that bolster the value of homes in communities across the country,” the study admitted.
* Article From: Breitbart News
