Since the 1990 Immigration Act was passed, the United States has added approximately 33.5 million foreign-born residents.[4] The foreign-born share of the population has increased dramatically, from 4.7% in 1970 to 7.9% in 1990 and 15.8% in January 2025.[7][4] Immigrants and their U.S.-born children together were roughly 93 million in 2024, about 28% of the country.[5]
These new residents put pressure on rent and home prices alike, particularly when they are concentrated in specific metro areas. In San Jose, California, for example, 42.1% of the population is foreign-born, up from 22.9% in 1990, adding about 468,000 people to Santa Clara County.[7][10] A median home costs more than nine times the median household income, among the highest ratios in the country.[10] For an American that was born and raised in Santa Clara county, mass immigration has not made them better off.
While wages have risen over the past few decades, they have not kept up with the rising cost of living in these areas. Average Americans - whose families have been in the country for generations, if not centuries - have to compete against huge influxes of foreigners, seeing their rent, home prices, grocery prices, and commute times all go up. This might come as good news for older Americans - who own homes that have increased significantly in value - but it is a negative for Gen Z and Millenials who can't afford a home in the area they grew up (or in most metropolitan areas).
This pattern repeats across the country. Metropolitan areas with over 10% foreign-born populations have significantly higher median home price to income ratios.[10] Regions with low growth (especially foreign-born growth) over the past few decades have seen comparably small changes in cost of living.
Foreign-Born Population (millions)
The crisis is localized
The affordability crisis that fills national headlines is concentrated in a short list of large metros, where huge population increases have occurred. And it's not a story simply of immigration - population growth occurs with and without it. Boise, for example, is only 7.9% foreign-born, yet a home there costs 5.5 times median household income. Boise grew on domestic migration instead, adding 28.7% to its population through net migrationi in the 2020's, the fastest of the US' 109 metros over 500,000 people.[10][17] Boise added residents faster than it added homes, and that is the same arithmetic whether the arrivals come from California or from abroad.
Nonetheless, immigration is a huge part of the issue. An extra 500,000 people in your metropolitan area - all of whom would not have been here if not for the 1990 Immigration Act - contributes to higher costs across the board. The average 30-year-old American who in 1990 would have been able to purchase a single-family home in Santa Clara could not do the same today. Yet, the same cannot be said about the likes of Cleveland, St.Louis, or Pittsburg - all of which are large metro areas of over 2 million residents - which have not seen the same sort of foreign-born growth. Many cities in the country are still affordable today - older homeowners may not have seen their home prices go up 1000% as they have in Northern California or South Florida, but their children and grandchildren can afford homes in the same area.
Metro area population growth since 1990
Twenty metros hold about 65% of the country's foreign-born
Prices climb with the foreign-born share
There are 109 metropolitan areas with over 500,000 residents in the country. There is a nearly 70% correlation between foreign-born percentage in a metro area - meaning there are more foreigners moving to that area - and the median home price vs. income ratio. For rent, this goes down to a 54% correlation.
We should remember that correlation is not causation. However, supply and demand never lie, and - particularly in areas with limited housing and home construction - an influx of foreigners will contribute to higher home and rent prices.
Mass Immigration = Higher Home Prices
Metro areas above 500K residents.
We can see this in play even more when we categorize metropolitan areas in different bands, with a clear upward trend in both median home price to income and the median rent price per income. Every step up in foreign-born percentage is a step up in what a home costs against local income, from 3.2x at the bottom to 6.1x at the top.[10]
| Foreign-born percentage | Metros | Avg. foreign-born | Avg. median home price to income |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 5% | 4 | 4.3% | 3.2x |
| 5 - 7% | 17 | 5.8% | 3.9x |
| 7 - 10% | 27 | 8.3% | 4.1x |
| 10 - 15% | 25 | 12.2% | 4.6x |
| 15 - 20% | 11 | 16.6% | 4.8x |
| 20% and over | 25 | 25.3% | 6.1x |
Supply and demand
At the end of the day, none of this is unique to immigration. A home costs more when the number of people bidding for it grows faster than the number of homes, whoever those people are. The clearest proof is a city that took in almost no immigrants and got expensive anyway.
This was true in the 1960's or 1990's as much as it true today. The difference is that in the 1960's, few foreigners were bidding for a home around the country. Americans competed against other Americans for homes (and everything else) and the system worked well. Now, with an immigration policy that for 35+ years has allowed 1 million immigrants in per year - not to include their children and grandchildren, as well as illegal immigration - the biggest markets are often deeply saturated. Construction simply cannot keep up with the demand, and thus the prices skyrocket.
Supply never caught up to demand
The standard answer to rising prices is to build more. In theory, this works. There is no fixed ceiling on how many homes a country can put up, and a metro that builds fast enough can absorb almost any number of new residents without prices breaking loose. Defenders of high immigration make exactly this case: the shortfall is a permitting and zoning failure that faster construction could solve.
This theory unfortunately does not translate to reality - the metros that took in the most immigrants are the ones that built the least relative to the demand they faced. Los Angeles, the California Bay Area, New York, and Boston draw the largest inflows, and they are also where zoning rules, environmental review, and a shortage of developable land hold construction down.[16] Demand arrived faster than supply could move, so the pressure landed on price instead of on new units.
The arithmetic has to be done in households, not people, because a housing unit holds a household. Immigrants arrive into larger households than the national average, 3.49 people in an owned home against 2.7 for the country as a whole.[21] During the 2021-2024 surge, net immigration of roughly 2.7 million people a year produced about 500,000 new households a year.[22] Foreign-born householders accounted for a quarter of all U.S. household growth between 2019 and 2023.[22]
Set against roughly 1.4 million housing units built each year, that national total is not by itself a shortage. The problem is where those households land. About 64% of the foreign-born live in 20 metros, and those are the same markets described above, the ones least able to add units when demand rises. A quarter of national household growth concentrated into a fifth of the country's housing markets, and the most constrained ones at that, is what turns an adequate national building rate into a local shortage.
The Sun Belt is the test of the opposite case. Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas permit homes at far higher rates than the coast,[15] and they built an enormous amount. It still was not enough. Phoenix added 3 million residents since 1990 and Dallas-Fort Worth 4.5 million, and prices climbed in both. Fast building slowed the damage but did not prevent it.
This is the honest version of the case for building. A country can build its way out of an immigration-driven shortage - but only if it actually builds, in the places that need it, faster than the people arrive. For thirty-five years that has not happened, because the places where demand was highest were exactly the places where building was hardest. "Just build more" is a promise the high-immigration metros never kept.
From the 1920s to the 1960s, immigration was low and the pace of building was ordinary. It was enough, because supply only had to keep up with the natural growth of the people already here, and homeownership rose for four straight decades. Federal mortgage guarantees, the thirty-year loan, and mass suburban construction did much of that work, and low immigration meant they were not building against a rising inflow at the same time. The post-1990 wave pushed demand in the top metros past the pace of construction there, and affordability broke.
Demand is also the part that policy can actually move. A bill can lower immigration next year. Zoning reform, developable land, and construction crews change over decades, if at all. Cutting the inflow is the faster and more reliable lever, and it is the one within reach.
Recommendations
A bill can cut the inflow next year. Zoning reform, developable land, and construction crews take decades, so the demand side is where policy moves first.
- Cut legal immigration by at least 80%, from over a million a year to roughly 200,000. An inflow equal to 1% of a city's population raises rents about 1%, and the high-immigration metros absorbed inflows of that size year after year for three decades.
- End illegal immigration with enforcement. The 2021-2024 border surge added several million people on top of the legal flow, landing in the same metros where prices had already broken loose.
- Build into the shortage in the metros that need it. National construction of about 1.4 million units a year is adequate in aggregate and falls far short in the twenty metros absorbing most of the arrivals. Lower demand there first, then let supply close the gap.
Where the foreign-born share is low, a home costs about three times a family's income. Where it is high, it costs five to nine times. Until immigration falls back toward a level the housing supply can match, that gap will keep pricing American families out of the country's largest metros.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau: Historical Census of Housing - Gross Rents - Median gross rent data, 1990 Census
- U.S. Census Bureau: ACS 2023 Median Gross Rent - American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, 2023
- Saiz, Albert. "Immigration and housing rents in American cities." Journal of Urban Economics 61.2 (2007): 345-371
- Center for Immigration Studies: Foreign-Born Population Report - 2025 estimates based on Census CPS data
- Migration Policy Institute: Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States - Immigrants and their U.S.-born children, 2024
- Harvard JCHS: Home Cost-to-Income Ratio - Analysis of national housing affordability trends
- U.S. Census Bureau: Foreign-Born Population - Official decennial census and ACS data on foreign-born population (1970-2023)
- Migration Policy Institute: U.S. Immigrant Population Over Time - Historical immigration trends and analysis
- DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics - Official legal permanent resident (Green Card) data by year
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023 - Median home value, median household income, median gross rent, and foreign-born share by metro area
- Construction Coverage: Cities With Highest Home Cost-to-Income Ratios - 2025 city rankings
- Brookings Institution: Population Growth in Metro America - Analysis of metropolitan population trends since 1980
- USDA Economic Research Service: Rural Economy and Population - Nonmetro population data, 1990-2020
- Migration Policy Institute: U.S. Immigrant Population by Metropolitan Area - Geographic concentration of the foreign-born population
- U.S. Census Bureau: Building Permits Survey - New residential construction permits by state and metro area
- Saiz, Albert. "The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply." Quarterly Journal of Economics 125.3 (2010): 1253-1296 - Land-use regulation and geography as constraints on housing supply
- U.S. Census Bureau / Census Reporter: Boise City, ID Metro Area Profile - Foreign-born share of the Boise metropolitan population, American Community Survey
- Idaho Department of Labor: Idaho Housing Market Analysis - Boise/Ada County home-price increases, price-to-income ratios, and in-migration from California, 2019-2022
- Euronews: Europe's cities ranked by rent-to-salary ratio - Rent burden as a share of average salary, major European cities
- Apartment List: How Have Rents Changed Since 1960? - Inflation-adjusted rent and renter-income growth by metro area, 1980-2014, based on U.S. Census and American Community Survey data
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey: Household size by nativity of householder - Average household size, foreign-born versus native-born householders, owner- and renter-occupied units
- Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies: What Effects Will the Recent Surge in Immigration Have on Household Growth? - Immigrant household formation and the foreign-born share of U.S. household growth, 2019-2023