The Briefing Room
General Category => Immigration/Border => Topic started by: rangerrebew on September 24, 2022, 07:06:00 pm
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Unsustainable Mass Migration Keeps California Growing at Everyone’s Expense
September 09, 2022
Michael Capuano
Researcher/Staff Writer
Every month, millions of Americans struggling to pay rent or save for a mortgage feel the crunch of the nation’s widely publicized housing crisis. Nowhere is this pain worse than California, where renting or buying has been notoriously unaffordable for decades even as the state continues to pave over what remains of its nature for more roads and subdivisions. In theory, prices should reflect high desirability, but for a number of years California has been losing hundreds of thousands of mostly middle-class Americans annually to other states. How, then, has the state maintained a nearly stable population and such high prices?
The answer is mass legal and illegal immigration, now California’s only source of population growth. California, with over 11 million foreign-born residents (27 percent of the state), has long experienced a constant influx of illegal aliens as a result of lax federal border policy and the generous benefits the “sanctuary state” provides to immigration violators. The state is also a magnet for lawful immigration, both by unskilled chain migrants and tech workers who compete with Americans for lucrative jobs. Academic research on immigration shows that high overall immigration drives up housing prices while motivating native-born residents to leave the area. The disruption of immigrant visas by COVID led directly to a dip in the state’s population in 2020 as immigration couldn’t compensate for Americans leaving. However, as legal and illegal immigration picks back up, California is again using foreigners as a crutch to compensate for the Americans who move away because of bad state policies.
https://www.fairus.org/blog/2022/09/09/unsustainable-mass-migration-keeps-california-growing-everyones-expense