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The one thing MAGA nativists get right

There is one way that immigration hurts American workers. But closing our borders isn’t the answer.

President Donald Trump blames immigrants for virtually every problem in American economic life. In the president’s telling, the undocumented have been taking American-born citizens’ jobs, lowering their wages, driving up their costs, and bankrupting their welfare programs.

These claims are largely false.

Most studies suggest that immigrants do not typically reduce wages or job opportunities for the American-born — and actually pay more in taxes than they receive in social welfare benefits (this is especially true of undocumented immigrants, due to their ineligibility for Social Security and Medicare).

But there is at least one way that immigration really can hurt American-born people economically: When migrants come to a locality in large numbers, they can push up housing costs for longtime residents.

The president called attention to that fact earlier this week. In a Truth Social post Sunday, Trump wrote, “Fed Reserve working paper suggests Biden illegal immigrant wave drove up home prices 30%.”

Here, the president was garbling the findings of a recently published Dallas Federal Reserve study, which mostly contradicts his narrative about immigration’s economic harms.

Still, that paper did find that unauthorized immigration pushed up both rents and home prices during the Biden era (albeit by much less than Trump claimed).

This is a real problem. Yet, the solution is not to close America’s borders. Throttling immigration would make America less prosperous, while doing little to make housing more affordable.

Fortunately, there is a way to secure immigration’s considerable economic benefits while limiting its more modest downsides: We can simply make it easier to build more homes.

How NIMBYs are helping to turn the public against immigrants

What the Dallas Fed study actually shows

The spike in unauthorized immigration under Biden was genuinely........

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