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A new study from economists at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco and Dallas has put figures to one of the most felt costs of the post-2020 immigration surge: in the places that received the largest inflows of unauthorized immigrant workers, home prices and rents rose faster, while homebuilding did not keep up.
The paper, "The Impacts of Unauthorized Immigration on U.S. Labor and Housing Markets: New Evidence from Administrative Microdata," was written by Daniel J. Wilson of the San Francisco Fed and Xiaoqing Zhou of the Dallas Fed. It was published as San Francisco Fed Working Paper 2026-23 in October 2026, following an earlier Dallas Fed version in March 2026.
The authors studied the period from March 2021 to March 2024, which they describe as an unprecedented boom in unauthorized immigration. Citing Congressional Budget Office estimates, they put net unauthorized immigration over that stretch at roughly 7 million people, before flows slowed sharply from mid-2024.
To measure where newcomers settled, the authors built new local measures from administrative microdata, including individual immigration court records, Customs and Border Protection parole data and Department of Homeland Security estimates of "got-aways." They measured house prices and rents from Zillow data and housing construction from building permits.
The headline housing finding is a demand shock hitting fixed supply. An increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows equal to 1 percent of a local area's initial employment was associated with house prices rising about 2.2 percent and market rents rising about 1.4 percent. The authors found essentially no effect on new housing permits, for single-family or multi-family construction, and only a muted effect on construction-sector employment.
Applied across the boom period, the estimates imply that in the average metropolitan area studied, unauthorized immigration accounted for roughly 30 percent of home-price growth and about 20 percent of rent growth. In those markets, house prices rose 22.4 percent overall between early 2021 and early 2024, so the immigration-linked share works out to about a 6.6 percent increase in prices. Because arrivals clustered in a handful of large cities, the effect in the typical market was smaller.
The paper's other findings give the housing result its context. The same inflows increased local employment approximately one-for-one, with no significant decline in average local wages, though the authors report mixed evidence on wage depression. They also found the flows reduced labor income per capita and government transfers.
The authors stress the limits of their work. The paper is a working paper circulated for professional comment, and its views are those of the authors, not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System. The estimates describe the average metropolitan area in the study and do not mean immigration was the only driver of rising housing costs; the remaining share of price and rent growth came from other factors.
For households, the study lands on an issue felt every month. When population growth outpaces the supply of homes, the paper finds, more people compete for the same homes, and rents and prices rise even though no extra homes are built to absorb them.