President Joe Biden’s mass migration is raising inflation, chiefly by raising housing prices, according to the Economist, a U.K.-based pro-globalism magazine for elites.
Citizens’ rents, per-capita wages, and workplace productivity are being damaged in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other wealthy countries where governments are extracting migrants from developing countries, says the April 30 article, headlined “Immigration is surging, with big economic consequences.”
“Immigration’s impact goes well beyond an arithmetic effect on GDP [Gross Domestic Product] — it extends to inflation, living standards and government budgets,” the April 30 article admits as it debunks the elite narratives:
Many policymakers have recently argued that migration is helping contain price rises by relieving labour shortages … Yet the evidence is weak and may, in fact, point in the opposite direction. Across the G10 [group of wealthy countries] … there is no doubt immigrants need things as soon as they arrive, boosting demand [for used autos, food, etc.].
Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of rental housing, which is in short supply across the anglosphere. Research by Goldman Sachs, a bank, suggests that in Australia each 100,000 increase in annual net overseas migration boosts rents by about 1%. A paper by the Bank of Canada in December noted that “the initial rise in immigration that Canada has experienced is more likely inflationary in the near term.”
The magazine’s admission is useful, in part, because few media outlets in the United States have dared describe the damage done to the economy and to Americans’ pocketbooks by Biden’s decision to welcome roughly 10 million illegal, quasi-legal, and legal immigrants since 2021.
That connection is also ignored in the GOP’s migration-related campaign pitches which highlight border chaos, illegal migrants, crime — and increasingly — the taxpayer burden of providing free healthcare and schooling for legal and quasi-legal migrants.
So far, the GOP’s donor-funded attack ads have ignored the links between Biden’s migration, inflation, and housing prices — despite swing voters’ anger at inflation, interest rates, and housing prices. For example, an April 28-30 poll by YouGov showed that “inflation/prices” is the most important issue for 23 percent of independents.
But the connection between consumer demand, immigration, and inflation is sneaking through the gatekeepers in the establishment media. For example, Bloomberg noted on April 4, “FHN Financial’s Chris Low points out that while a bigger labor force puts downward pressure on wages, ‘it also puts upward pressure on prices.’ After all, ‘more people are eating, driving and living here.’”
Housing’s contribution to inflation has significantly increased. Housing now accounts for a third of the consumer basket of items measured in CPI, so even small increases can have an outsized impact on inflation.[1] Last June, housing accounted for a fifth of inflation, contributing 1.7 percentage points. By March 2023, housing’s contribution rose to 2.6 percentage points, making up half of annual CPI inflation. For perspective, before the pandemic housing would typically contribute about 1 percentage point to inflation.
The rising inflation caused by migration has prompted the Federal Reserve to bump up interest rates, which then drives up the cost of the loans needed to construct or buy housing.
WTOP reported April 11 on the dilemma facing Anton and Shelby Rogozhnikov in Texas.
The couple owns a townhome in Dallas and want more space now that they’re planning on having their first child. They’re looking for a house with at least three bedrooms that’s priced within their budget of around $300,000.
…
“I know interest rates will go down eventually, but I feel like when they go down housing prices might go back up again,” said Shelby Rogozhnikov, 38. a dental hygienist. “I have the mortgage rate thing to worry about and my biological clock, which has less time on it than the mortgage rates, so it’s now or never.”
Although new arrivals are clearly boosting GDP [Gross Domestic Product, or the size of national economies], they appear to be dragging down GDP per person — the yardstick by which economists usually assess living standards. GDP per person has fallen or failed to grow for four consecutive quarters in Australia and seven in Britain. In Canada, where the drop in the measure is most pronounced, output per person fell by 2% in 2023. The picture is similar in Germany, Iceland and New Zealand.
Some metropolitan areas experienced faster growth in the relative supply of less-skilled labor in the 1980s and 1990s due to an immigration wave and the tendency of immigrants to regionally cluster. [Factory] Plants in these areas adopted significantly less machinery per unit output, despite having similar adoption plans initially.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.
The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.
The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.
The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens and economies in Canada and the United Kingdom.
The colonialism-like policy has damaged small nations and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.