Dallas Fed Ties Illegal Immigration to 30% of Housing Price Surge. A Top NAR Economist Projects $1 Million Median by 2050.

Since this outlet began tracking housing affordability research earlier this month, the evidence has shifted from anecdote to federal data. Two separate findings now put numbers on what millions of Americans already feel.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published a study examining the housing market impact of unauthorized immigration from early 2021 to early 2024. The findings are specific: an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows equal to 1% of a local area's initial employment raised local house prices by 2.2% and local rents by 1.4%.

The Congressional Budget Office estimate cited in the Dallas Fed report puts net unauthorized immigration at roughly 7 million people between 2021 and 2024, averaging 1.75 million per year. For context, the same report notes that net unauthorized immigration averaged only 0.1 million per year from 2000 to 2019, and was slightly negative from 2010 to 2019.

The Dallas Fed's own back-of-the-envelope calculation: unauthorized immigrant worker flows explain about 30% of total home price growth and 20% of total rent growth during that boom period for the average local market.

A separate HUD investigation, published in 2025, reached a similar conclusion. It found that between 2021 and 2024, the U.S. foreign-born population increased by more than 6 million — the largest such increase over a comparable period in American history — and that this immigration-driven household formation contributed materially to housing demand. The HUD report noted that in some markets, immigration accounted for nearly all of the increase in housing demand in recent years.

These are federal agency findings, not campaign literature.

The Other 70%

Illegal immigration is a real factor. It is NOT the whole story.

Seven out of ten percentage points of that home price increase came from something else. Restrictive local zoning laws, permitting delays, high construction costs, historically low housing starts relative to household formation, decades of NIMBYism, and the post-2020 mortgage rate shock all contributed. Blaming immigration alone for the affordability crisis is analytically incomplete, and any honest reading of the Dallas Fed report says so too. The researchers themselves call their immigration figure a partial explanation of a broader boom.

There's a legitimate counter-argument worth stating directly: some economists and housing advocates argue that immigrants, including unauthorized ones, also add labor supply to the construction sector, which can help hold down building costs. If deporting the construction workforce drives up labor costs, that could offset some of the demand-side relief. The Dallas Fed study does not resolve this tension. It measures the demand effect; it does not model a net policy outcome from large-scale deportation.

Where This Ends Up

Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, made a projection at a conference in Washington, D.C. that has circulated through housing circles: the national median home price will hit $1 million by approximately 2050. He used multiple modeling scenarios and said each pointed to roughly the same timeline. The current national median sales price for existing homes sits at approximately $430,000.

Yun's historical comparison grounds the projection. In 1990, the national median was $90,000. San Francisco's median that year was $250,000, considered shocking at the time. These numbers are not imaginary futures. They are extrapolations from a documented trend line.

The Daily Wire's coverage of Yun's forecast includes the story of Micah Longmire, a 31-year-old earning $200,000 annually who, after more than two years of searching, concluded he and his wife could not comfortably buy a home on their own. That anecdote is illustrative but not data. A $200,000 income is top-10% nationally, and affordability at that level depends heavily on the specific market, savings, debt load, and risk tolerance. It should not be treated as a universal benchmark, but it does signal that even high earners in high-cost markets are feeling structural pressure.

What Is and Isn't Proven

What is proven: the Dallas Fed study documents a statistically significant relationship between unauthorized immigration flows and local housing prices during 2021 to 2024. What is alleged but not fully resolved: the long-run net effect on affordability once labor supply impacts are accounted for. What the sourcing here does not establish: whether the current administration's immigration enforcement will translate into measurable housing cost relief, or how quickly such a signal would show up in price data.

Breitbart's framing attributes the entire housing affordability crisis to Biden-era immigration policy and presents the Dallas Fed findings as a straightforward indictment. The Dallas Fed report is more careful. Its authors describe a partial explanation within a complex market, not a single cause. That distinction matters.

The unresolved question is concrete: the Dallas Fed study covers 2021 to 2024. Immigration enforcement has tightened significantly since early 2025. Whether the demand-side reduction shows up in rent and price data in 2026 and beyond is a testable hypothesis, and no federal housing agency has published updated modeled estimates as of June 22, 2026.