Immigration is Why Americans/Britons/Aussies/Canadians Can't Afford a Home

The sharp rise in international migration is a pressing social and economic issue, as seen in the recent global trend towards nationalism. One major concern is the impact of immigration on housing. We assemble a comprehensive database of 474 estimates of immigration's impact on house prices in 14 destination countries and find that immigration increases house prices, on average. However, attitudes to immigrants moderate this effect. In countries less welcoming to immigrants, house price increases are more limited.

Get that? On one end of the scale is no immigration and opposition to foreigners and at the other end of the spectrum is open borders and treating foreigners better than natives. Where are the housing crises in the West? In the countries with the most extreme pro-migration policies, homes are the least affordable. Within those countries, the most extreme pro-migrant cities have the least affordable housing.

These numbers are skewed by the housing bubbles in the USA and Spain. If you strip out the bubble effects from monetary policy (or look at cities with high migration such as NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, etc.), the correlation would be much clearer and much stronger.

The most ironic finding is that "xenophobia" and "racism," whatever terms the open borders crowd might call it, depresses the impact of immigration because where people do not like living near immigrants, they naturally depress housing demand because immigrants either find it hard to buy or do not want to live where they aren't welcome.

At this point some are already chafing to scream "central bankers!" It is true central bank policies and pro-housing government policies can drive up prices, but these policies are like ammonia and immigration bleach. At a practical level, you can ban immigration much more easily than you can abolish the central bank and pro-housing policies.

Western migration policies are very extreme in the most pejorative sense of being far out of the mainstream. If the average person understood how much it was driving them out of desirable city living, the "xenophobia" would make your head spin. Extremist immigration policy is already to the point where people who are well to the left of center talk exactly like Donald Trump and his supporters.

I Understand Helping struggling Immigrants,but MY CITY (Los Angeles) ISNT TAKING CARE OF ITS OWN.WHAT ABOUT THE 50,000+🇺🇸Citizens WHO LIVE ON THE STREETS.PPL WHO LIVE BELOW POVERTY LINE,& HUNGRY? If My State Can’t Take Care of Its Own(Many Are VETS)How Can it Take Care Of More

— Cher (@cher) April 14, 2019

This is why Democrats are running scared on immigration and why it is the issue that will secure a Trump victory in 2020 more so than in 2016.

More broadly, the "far-right" has an ever growing monopoly on common sense. There is rightly some fear of rising political extremism and growing support for the "far-right" because extremism on the left creates conditions for a reaction. The tragedy is the establisment, the "center" and the "centrists" cannot implement common sense because it is "far-right extremism" relative to the mainstream media-controlled narrative. Establishment politicians must virtue signal their ever more progressive views or risk being toppled. And thus reality drifts even more in a far-right direction and the more realist (reactionary) political movements have greater monopoly over truth and common sense. Victory will be theirs unless the progressive establishment can achieve Chinese levels of political, social and narrative/thought control. Hence the emergent ideological fusion of the Chinese Communist Party and Silicon Valley.