The nation is, pundits claim, in the grips of both an immigration and a housing crisis. Resolve one, immigration, and the other, housing, will ease, a rare opportunity unnoticed by the legacy media, to resolve two crises’ at once. The U.S. housing market has been attempting to cope with an historic illegal immigrant influx that has put extreme upward pressure on availability and price, a double whammy for prospective buyers and renters.
Even immigration experts cannot agree on the total number of unlawful aliens who crossed the border during the Biden administration’s four White House years. Border Czar Tom Homan, a man in a position to know, said that the federal government is aware of at least 10.5 million illegal aliens and another two million gotaways. More than one million legal immigrants settle in the U.S. every year. Another million or so temporary workers, students and other visa holders also take up residency. The 14.5 million newly arrived legal and illegal immigrants exceed Pennsylvania’s13.1 million population. Pennsylvania is the nation’s fifth most populous state.
Immigrant arrival totals represent either single individuals or family units; all require housing. Econ 101, the law of supply and demand, explains what happened in the housing market. If the affordable housing supply is limited, increasing demand via immigration is a indefensible policy that harms lower and-middle class Americans or young married couples hoping to purchase their first homes. Rental rates are increasingly costly. In the nation’s largest cities, renting is more affordable than paying a monthly mortgage. The Biden administration’s unkept promise to build two million additional homes via still more inflation-causing deficit spending would only have exacerbated the underlying problem.
The Biden administration lent illegal immigrants a helping hand toward home ownership. The American Rescue Plan allocated $5 billion in additional emergency housing vouchers to the $80 billion Congress had previously assigned in prior COVID-19 relief legislation. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge helped change the program’s participation requirements so that illegal aliens were eligible to receive HUD vouchers that could be used to subsidize rent and forestall mortgage foreclosures.
HUD waved the requirement to obtain and verify Social Security numbers and supplemental documentation evidencing eligible noncitizen status before approving family units to the Emergency Housing Vouchers program (EHV), wrote Dominique Bloom, general deputy assistant secretary for Public and Indian Housing. Because of the millions of illegal immigrants who qualified for vouchers, the $5 billion, expected to last until the end of the decade, is running dry. A March letter from HUD advised groups dispersing the funding to “manage your EHV program with the expectation that no additional funding from HUD will be forthcoming.”
California, New York and Texas, all popular illegal alien destinations, have the most EHV beneficiaries,15,421, 9,458 and 3,486 respectively. In her letter to U.S. Rep. French Hill (R-ARK.), the House Financial Services Chair, California Democrat Maxine Waters urged that the EHV program be fully funded, specifically, to add a supplemental $8 billion infusion.
Last year in his September speech to the Economic Club of New York, then-presidential candidate Trump laid out his immigration platform that went beyond securing the border and deporting illegal aliens. In that speech, Trump called for barring illegal immigrants from obtaining home mortgage loans as well as banning other types of financial assistance like EHVs which some unlawfully present aliens have abused. Such actions would significantly reduce housing demand and would put prospective American homeowners in a better position to realize their home-owning dreams.
Scott Turner, the current HUD Secretary, said “Social safety nets were never meant to be a hammock or a resting place.” HUD’s mission, Turner continued, is not to increase the number of people on subsidies but rather to help people to live a self-sustaining life. Of HUD’s new partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, Turner said that it’s a data collection effort to learn who’s living in HUD-funded housing with FHA-backed mortgages, which American taxpayers underwrite.
“There will be no more illegal aliens getting HUD-backed home loans,” Turner promised. Turner:
“The Biden administration exploited taxpayer resources and manipulated FHA policy to allow illegal aliens to ride the coattails of the American taxpayer when financing a home. For those who play by the rules and work hard to purchase a home, it is unconscionable. HUD will continue to implement President Trump’s Executive Order ending taxpayer subsidization of open borders and protecting the American Dream of homeownership.”
Try as it might, the open borders lobby cannot elucidate a rational argument in support of aiding and abetting foreign nationals’ homeownership at American citizens’ expense.
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