Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has identified the border crisis as an obvious factor driving the increase in rent prices.
Appearing on “Mornings with Maria” on Fox Business, Bessent said that “Bidenflation” during the Biden administration hit working Americans hardest, and that the Trump administration is working hard to relieve some of that pressure. Host Maria Bartiromo asked him what specific policies could bring prices down, and he said that enforcement of immigration law is a leverage point for lowering costs across the board.
“With affordability, I suspect we’ll see a substantial drop in inflation in the first six months of next year,” Bessent predicted. “Rents are down. The story that the Biden administration doesn’t want to talk about: the mass unfettered immigration. It pushed up rents especially for working Americans.
“There’s a recent study out from Wharton School that shows every 1 percent increase in population, rents went up 1 percent. So President Trump, by enforcing the border, sending home more than 2 million illegals, rents are—we’re now seeing [Class] D and C rents coming down substantially. I think that will continue for the rest of the year.
“We brought interest rates down, so we’ve seen mortgage rates down. And I think everything else will follow that.”
The study Bessent pointed to was published by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Noting that immigrants tend to live in rented housing and concentrate in certain metropolitan areas with strong immigrant and ethnic networks, the author compiled data on rents, housing prices, immigration, income, and employment for several metropolitan areas ranging from 1983-1997 and the 1970-2000 Censuses.
The study found a causal relationship between immigration and rents.
“An immigration inflow that amounts to 1 percent of the initial metropolitan area population is associated with, roughly, a 1 percent increase in rents and housing values,” the study found. It also noted, citing labor literature, that a 1 percent increase in the immigrant population lowers wages by 0.03 percent.
That study has been backed by more recent research.
A 2017 study from the Urban Institute found roughly the same results, with a 1 percent increase in immigrant population in a metropolitan statistical area linked to a 0.8 percent increase in both rents and home prices. But the study found “spillover effects” in the surrounding areas. A 1 percent increase was linked to a 1.6 percent increase in rents and a 9.6 percent increase in home prices in surrounding metropolitan statistical areas, possibly caused by native populations moving into the suburbs when immigrants move into the city.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development found a more tangible link between increased immigration and rent prices. In its 2025 Worst Case Housing Needs report to Congress, HUD noted that the foreign-born population increased by an estimated 5.1 million people between 2022 and 2024—the largest 2-year increase in the history of the country—and 20 million since the year 2000, up to 53 million individuals.
Referring to the aforementioned Wharton study, HUD found that “[i]mmigration accounts for up to 100 percent of housing demand growth in some regions, and for two-thirds of rental demand growth nationwide.” Just in the states of California and New York, immigrants accounted for fully 100 percent of all growth in rents and more than half of owned housing.
