Vice President JD Vance has exaggerated the increase in home prices during President Joe Biden’s time in office and has misleadingly pointed to illegal immigration as a primary cause of a rise in prices.
In a Fox News interview on Nov. 13, Vance said that “the price of a new home literally doubled” under Biden. But home sales price measures show at most a 37% increase. Vance appears to be referring to an increase in the monthly cost of new homes, an increase that factors in a rise in mortgage rates.
In that interview and in a Dec. 2 Cabinet meeting, Vance pointed to illegal immigration as a primary cause. “Why did homes get so unaffordable?” he said in the Cabinet meeting. “Because we had 20 million illegal aliens in this country taking homes that ought by right to go to American citizens,” he said, using an exaggerated figure.
While immigration overall does affect housing costs by increasing demand, economists say the primary drivers in recent years were low mortgage interest rates that sparked demand, a subsequent rise in interest rates and a problem with low housing supply that dates back to the Great Recession in 2007 to 2009. Immigrants in the country illegally are also more likely to rent, not buy, experts say.
Jacob Vigdor, a University of Washington public policy and governance professor who has written about immigration and housing, told us that “there is a link but I would not say that immigration, illegal or otherwise, has been a ‘driving factor’ in escalating housing costs.” He estimated a less than 1% impact on the current median sales price.
Vance correctly noted the low housing supply in his Nov. 13 interview. He said, “And at the same time, we weren’t building enough new houses to begin with, even for the population that we had.”
He further said the Trump administration was “trying to make it easier to build houses” and “getting all of those illegal aliens out of our country,” measures that were starting “to pay some dividends” with the housing price growth slowing to about 1% to 2% under President Donald Trump. One housing metric supports those figures, but the slowdown began well before Trump took office in January.
Vance made similar claims in an Aug. 28 Fox News interview, saying there was a “100% housing price increase in four years under Joe Biden.” He said the increase was due to high interest rates and illegal immigration, and that the “main driver” of housing prices flattening was “negative net migration.”
But housing experts cite other factors for the slowdown in rising prices.
Home Prices Under Biden
According to federal data, home prices increased during the Biden administration, but not nearly as much as Vance claimed. The Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development data show there was a 21.1% increase in the median sales price of new homes, rising from $354,800 in January 2021 to $429,600 in January 2025.
The National Association of Realtors’ seasonally adjusted annual sales figures show a similar trend for existing single-family homes. In 2024, the national median price was $412,500, a 37.4% increase from 2020, the year before Biden took office.
Another commonly used metric, the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller national home price index, which tracks monthly price changes in existing single-family homes, increased about 36.9% during the Biden administration, as measured from January 2021 to January 2025.
Vance’s claim about housing price growth slowing is supported by the Case-Shiller Index, which has risen 1.62% since Trump took office in January.
But Vigdor told us that this slowdown “started in March 2024, 10 months before the current administration took office.”
The Case-Shiller Index rose by 2.1% over those 10 months.
“There are a couple of things going on,” Vigdor said. “Demographically, birth rates are falling and the population is aging, which will naturally reduce the number of young families looking to purchase a home. That softens the demand side.” He added that “buyers may also be waiting for interest rates to come down, or for macroeconomic uncertainty associated with tariffs and other Trump administration initiatives to resolve.”
The other home price measures show conflicting changes since Trump took office in January. The Census Bureau and HUD data on the median price of new homes show a 3.7% decrease from January to August, the most recent month available. NAR’s figures for the median existing single-family home price show a 7.5% increase over the same time period. The monthly data isn’t seasonally adjusted.
Rising Mortgage Rates
Although the Vance press office declined to provide us an on-the-record response, when Vance cited a similar statistic in March, Vance’s staff pointed PolitiFact to a May 2024 Heritage Foundation report that said in Biden’s first three years, “the cost of a median price home has more than doubled, increasing 114.5%.” But that statistic was referring to the monthly carrying costs of a new home purchase, not the purchase price. The very next line in the Heritage report stated that “average prices paid by consumers have risen 19.3%.”
Mortgage rates, and consequently the monthly mortgage costs of a newly purchased home, went up substantially under the Biden administration. The 30-year fixed rate mortgage average rose from 2.77% in the week he took office in 2021 to 6.96% in the week he left office this year. Since the Trump administration took over, the average rate dropped to 6.19% as of Dec. 4.
We asked the Heritage Foundation about its 114.5% calculation, but we didn’t get a response. Our own calculations using the Census and HUD price data and the 30-year fixed mortgage rates (assuming a 20% down payment) show that the monthly mortgage payment for a median-priced new home was about $1,162 in January 2021. At the peak of prices in October 2022, that monthly payment rose to $2,470. By the end of Biden’s term in January, it had declined slightly to $2,277. So, the increase in the monthly mortgage payment for a median-priced new home was about 96% over Biden’s presidency.
Contrary to Vance’s statements, the May 2024 Heritage Foundation piece didn’t blame the higher prices or mortgage rates on illegal immigration. Instead, it faulted federal deficits and borrowing; the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates, “which then amplified the increase in home prices as would-be buyers bid up sales prices”; and the Fed then increasing interest rates to combat inflation, “which caused borrowing costs to skyrocket.”
Illegal Immigration Not Primary Driver of Prices
Vance attributes the increase in home prices to “20 million” or “30 million,” as he said on Nov. 13, “illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens.” Those figures are exaggerations.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed that about 18 million or 20 million immigrants had entered the country illegally during Biden’s time in office. We calculated in June 2024 that the figure would be about a third of that, including an estimated 2 million “gotaways” who evaded capture by Border Patrol and about 3 million people released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.
The Pew Research Center estimates that as of 2023 there were 14 million “unauthorized immigrants” residing in the U.S. in total, which includes those with some protection from deportation, such as parole or having applied for asylum. That’s nearly 4 million more than the 10.2 million estimate from the Pew Research Center for 2019.
Their impact on housing is much smaller than Vance suggests, according to experts.
“I reported that every immigrant entering a local housing market, which I defined as a county, raises home values by about 11.6 cents,” Vigdor, who released a study in 2013 examining the link between immigration and housing prices, explained in an email. Using the Pew Research Center estimate for the unauthorized population, Vigdor estimated “32,000 unauthorized immigrants in the ‘typical’ American housing market, which suggests a boost to home values of under $4,000, or less than 1% of the current median sales price in the US.”
Steven A. Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports lower levels of immigration, said in September 2024 testimony to Congress that immigration was driving an increase in demand for rental housing. His analysis, he said, “indicates that a 5-percentage point increase in the recent immigrant share of a metro area’s population is associated with a 12 percent increase in the average U.S.-born household’s rent, relative to their income.” He noted that this was “only a simple correlation and does not include homeowners. Much more detailed analysis would be necessary to confirm this relationship.”
Other experts acknowledge that immigration overall plays a role in the supply and demand of housing, but they also point to larger factors driving home prices in recent years.
Neel Kashkari, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wrote in May 2024 that “there appears to be a significant shortage of housing that will take a long time to close,” due to supply not keeping up with demand since the Great Recession. “In addition, responses to COVID have led to an increase in people working from home, and that has led to increased demand for housing.” As for immigration, he said, “While the long-run effect of increased immigration on inflation is unclear, immigrants nonetheless need a place to live, and their arrival in the U.S. has likely also increased demand for housing.”
Chris Herbert, the managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, told us via email that “[v]ery low interest rates during the pandemic were a significant factor in rapidly rising prices. And the slowdown in price growth has been heavily influenced by the sharp rise in rates as the Federal Reserve moved aggressively to slow inflation.”
Similar to Kashkari’s remarks, an October 2024 article by the Joint Center for Housing Studies said that the low interest rates during the pandemic “motivated a spike in housing demand among those wanting to take advantage of the lower rates and the greater purchasing power they provided. The heightened demand from these factors quickly clashed with the country’s constrained housing supply, which remained at insufficient levels after years of underproduction following the Great Recession. These forces combined to put enormous pressure on home prices as well as rents, as the growing number of renter households competed for limited rental stock.”
The article, by the center’s senior research analyst, Riordan Frost, looked at the role of immigration in housing costs and found that “the recent surge in immigration … does not line up with the high growth in both rents and home prices that happened at the start of the pandemic.” The largest increases in prices occurred in 2020 and 2021 before immigration rose in 2022 and 2023, Frost wrote, noting that the growth rate in prices slowed in those latter years.
“Immigrants play a role in household growth, sometimes to a substantial degree, but housing demand during the pandemic has been primarily shaped by native-born household growth in a time of constrained housing supply,” Frost wrote. One-quarter of household growth from 2019-2023 was due to foreign-born householders, while the rest was native-born household growth, he said, citing Census Bureau data.
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, also pushed back against Vance’s assertions. “It is misplaced to blame immigration for the runup in house prices since the pandemic,” he told us in an email, noting that “[m]ost new immigrants rent” and the construction industry is “more dependent” than any other “on immigrant workers.”
Frost’s analysis also said that immigrants are strong contributors to the housing supply side as they accounted for 34% of construction trade jobs in 2023, based on Census data.
“The recent flat house prices are unrelated to less immigration, as immigrants generally don’t own homes,” said Zandi, whose work was frequently referenced by the Biden administration. “However, affordability remains a problem given high mortgage rates and the previous runup in house prices, rising homeowner insurance rates, and property taxes.”
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