Hacker News Reader

Comment by Auracle | Hacker News Reader

I’ve gotten downvoted for mentioning this on HN before but I’ll say it again - all we would need to do to largely stabilize housing prices would be to secure our borders. Our population growth is largely due to immigration, and right now we’re letting in over a million immigrants a year who will statistically have more children than the people that are already here.

View on HN

I don't think immigration is strictly our problem. Well, it actually might be: it is really hard to find people to build houses right now, and legal immigration of skilled construction workers from Mexico and Central America would really do a lot to solve that problem. But then we might be screwing those countries.

That seems unlikely. A difference of a million or so out of 350 million Americans is not going to have much impact on stabilizing housing. Further, poor immigrants are not buying houses. Perhaps we have to look at regulating foreign buyers, you know, folks with money. But blaming immigrants seems misplaced.

"Last year, 912,000 single-family homes were built, according to building permit data from the US Census. The US population grew by more than 3 million people in that time."

https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced...

Cutting that population growth by 1/3rd (or more, really, considering children) sure would help that number, would it not? A huge, huge portion of our population growth is due to illegal immigration.

It's more than a million. And there are delayed effects, like family members coming and of course a higher reproductive rate. Just more people to house in general. Of course immigration is a good thing overall, but let's get skilled workers in first and then fill the rest of the space fairly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com