A new Brookings Institution study found that the surge of migrants admitted under former President Joe Biden pushed rents higher and dragged down average wages, findings that even the left-leaning think tank's own researchers could not explain away.
The Brookings report, published this week, examined how the post-pandemic migration wave affected American labor and housing markets. Its central finding: the influx of immigrants who arrived during the Biden years may have reduced average wages for all workers by as much as 1.5 percent, driven largely by newcomers filling lower-wage jobs. At the same time, housing demand generated by those arrivals caused rents to climb 1.4 to 1.6 percent, Breitbart News reported.
The numbers land in a political environment where Americans are still feeling the squeeze of elevated housing costs and stagnant real earnings. And they arrive from Brookings, an institution that typically aligns with progressive policy assumptions, which makes the concessions harder for the open-borders crowd to dismiss.
The Brookings report did not present its findings as an indictment of Biden-era immigration policy. Its researchers characterized the overall migration as a net benefit, noting that native-born workers' wages rose 0.9 percent overall and that native-born employment remained "roughly unchanged." The report also claimed that native renters' wages increased by at least 1.6 percent net of the rent hike, theoretically leaving them slightly ahead.
But those caveats do not erase the headline numbers. As the report itself stated:
"The influx may have reduced average wages of all workers by as much as 1.5%, likely in part because immigrants took lower-wage jobs. But U.S. natives' wages rose 0.9% overall and native-born employment was roughly unchanged."
Read that again. Average wages across the entire workforce fell. The Brookings authors tried to isolate native-born workers from the damage, but the aggregate effect on American paychecks, including legal immigrants already here, was negative. Workers competing at the lower end of the wage scale bore the brunt.
On housing, Brookings acknowledged the pressure directly:
"Housing demand generated by the new immigrants caused rents to rise by 1.4 to 1.6%, the paper finds, but native renters' wages rose by more, increasing at least 1.6% net of the rent increase."
That framing asks Americans to feel grateful that their wages barely outpaced the rent increases that the same migration wave caused. For families already stretched thin, a 1.4 to 1.6 percent rent hike is not an abstraction. It is a higher monthly bill that someone has to pay.
The Brookings report is not the only institution to reach these conclusions. A Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas study published in June found that the impact of mass immigration drove housing prices higher from early 2021 to early 2024, essentially the full span of the Biden presidency's border policies.
The Dallas Fed's numbers were more granular and more damning. Its researchers found that a 1 percent increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows relative to a local area's initial employment pushed local house prices up 2.2 percent and local rents up 1.4 percent during the boom period.
The broader picture was stark. As the Dallas Fed report put it:
"A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that UIWF [unauthorized immigrant worker flows] can explain about 30% of the total growth in house prices and 20% of total growth in rents over the boom period for the average local market."
Thirty percent of total house price growth. One-fifth of all rent increases. Those are not marginal effects. For young families trying to buy a first home or working-class renters watching their housing costs eat deeper into each paycheck, illegal immigration was not a footnote in the affordability crisis. It was a primary driver.
The political class that presided over rising prices and their consequences spent years denying any connection between mass migration and the cost of living. The Dallas Fed's data makes that denial harder to sustain.
Add a third federal source to the pile. A Housing and Urban Development investigation published last year found that Biden's admission of millions of migrants drove up prices specifically for low-income Americans who do not receive public assistance, the people least equipped to absorb higher costs and least likely to have a government safety net cushioning the blow.
That finding matters because it identifies who actually pays the price for elite immigration policy. It is not the Brookings researchers or the congressional staffers who set the terms of the debate. It is low-income workers and renters, people who compete directly with newly arrived migrants for jobs, apartments, and public resources.
The pattern across all three studies is consistent. Brookings, the Dallas Fed, and HUD each approached the question from different angles and reached the same core finding: adding millions of people to the U.S. population under Biden's watch drove up housing costs and put downward pressure on wages at the bottom of the labor market.
For years, defenders of open-border policies insisted that mass immigration was an unqualified economic good, that newcomers filled labor shortages, paid taxes, and boosted growth without meaningful costs to native-born Americans. That argument always required ignoring what working people could see with their own eyes: tighter housing markets, longer waits, and paychecks that did not stretch as far.
Now the institutions that progressives trust most are confirming what ordinary Americans already knew. The Brookings Institution, not a conservative think tank, not a restrictionist advocacy group, found that Biden-era migration cut average wages and raised rents. The Dallas Fed quantified how illegal immigrant flows accounted for nearly a third of house price growth. HUD documented the toll on the poorest Americans.
The scale of what happened under Biden is difficult to overstate. Millions of migrants were admitted to the United States during his single term, a wave that Brookings itself examined as the post-pandemic migration surge. The economic consequences were not theoretical. They showed up in rent checks and pay stubs across the country.
None of this should surprise anyone who has watched how elected officials handle accountability. The same political figures who championed loose border enforcement and misrepresented their own records on related issues spent years dismissing concerns about immigration's economic effects as nativist fear-mongering.
The Brookings researchers tried to soften their own findings by emphasizing that native-born workers' wages edged up slightly and that employment levels held roughly steady. But those qualifications only underscore the selective framing. When you flood the labor market with workers willing to accept lower pay, average wages fall. When you add millions of new residents to a housing market that was already undersupplied, rents rise. These are not controversial economic propositions. They are supply and demand.
The political left has spent considerable energy on internal fights over messaging and direction, but the substantive question remains unanswered: who bears the cost when Washington decides to admit millions of people without regard for the downstream effects on jobs and housing?
Brookings, the Dallas Fed, and HUD have now answered that question with data. The costs fall on the people who can least afford them, low-wage workers, renters, and families without a government check to fall back on. The benefits accrue to employers who get cheaper labor and to policymakers who get to feel generous with other people's money.
When even Brookings cannot hide the damage, the debate is over. The only question left is whether anyone in Washington will be held accountable for the bill that working Americans are still paying.