You didn’t imagine it. Your rent really did skyrocket under Joe Biden. And now we have the receipts — straight from the Federal Reserve.
A new working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has confirmed what every working American already felt in their wallet: the Biden administration’s open border policy didn’t just flood the country with millions of illegal aliens — it drove up housing costs for every American family trying to keep a roof over their heads:
A new Federal Reserve working paper found the record surge in illegal immigration during the Biden administration triggered higher home prices and rents.
The findings arrive as immigration remains a polarizing political issue. Republicans argue former President Joe Biden’s border policies strained housing and public resources, while Democrats say immigration helped ease labor shortages and supported economic growth.
The paper, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, combines immigration court records with government administrative data to measure how the unprecedented wave of illegal immigration between 2021 and 2024 affected local labor and housing markets.
The numbers are brutal. For every 1% increase in unauthorized workers relative to a local labor force, home prices rose roughly 2.2% and rents climbed 1.4%. And here’s the kicker — homebuilding didn’t come close to keeping up with the demand surge. The market was already stretched thin, and Biden dumped millions of additional housing consumers into it without a second thought for the American citizens already struggling to afford a place to live.
The scope of the damage is staggering. Between March 2021 and March 2024 — the heart of the Biden border catastrophe — illegal immigration accounted for approximately 30% of home price growth and 20% of rent growth in the average American metro area. One in five dollars of your rent increase. Courtesy of Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to abandon the border.
Democrats spent years wringing their hands about housing affordability. They held hearings. They gave speeches. They blamed landlords, blamed developers, blamed zoning laws, blamed everything and everyone except the policy they were actively implementing that was pouring fuel on the fire. Not one of them will touch this Federal Reserve report with a ten-foot pole. Don’t hold your breath waiting for CNN to lead with it.
Here’s the part that cuts through all the noise: this didn’t have to happen. None of it. The laws were already on the books. The border infrastructure existed. What was missing was a president willing to enforce the law — something so basic, so fundamental to the job, that its absence should disqualify everyone responsible from ever holding public office again.
Trump enforced the law. And since January 2025, housing cost growth has already begun to moderate. These things don’t reverse overnight. But they do reverse — when you stop deliberately making them worse.
Joe Biden made a choice. He chose open borders over affordable housing for American families. They chose illegal immigration over the working-class voters they claimed to represent. And millions of Americans paid for that choice every single month when the rent came due.
