Mass Immigration Drives Virginia's Rental Crisis

Housing affordability remains a pressing issue for many of Virginia's renters and top priority for many of the state's voters leading into this November's elections. It ranks as the only southern state in the top 10 most expensive states to rent in, with one-bedroom apartments averaging over $1,700. Excessive immigration carries much of the blame, as it prices out low-income Americans in high-density cities, creating a ripple effect as those renters spread into cheaper counties.

Virginia is not alone in suffering from a housing crunch. Nationwide, housing prices have risen 47 percent since early 2020—twice as fast as they rose during the 2010s—while median household income has grown just 22.5 percent.

But Virginia is worse off than most.

Virginia has a lower rental vacancy rate of than the national average, and it's no longer limited to wealthy areas near Washington, D.C. The insurance comparison site the Zebra ranks Virginia Beach as the worst city for renters nationwide and Richmond as the ninth-worst. From 2023–2024, Richmond had the fourth-highest rent growth in the country, followed by Virginia Beach at number five. Even in the southwest city of Roanoke, half the renter population is cost burdened—spending over half their income on rent.

Virginia's High Rents Coincide with Increased Immigration

Virginia's rental crisis hasn't only coincided with higher-than-average immigration. It's coincided with sharp spikes in higher-than-average immigration.

The state now has over a million foreign-born residents in a population of less than 9 million people, up from just over 300,000 in 1990. According to the Migration Policy Institute, Virginia's foreign-born population increased by 104 percent from 2000–2023, while its American-born population increased by only 16 percent. From July 2023–2024, immigrants accounted for nearly three-fourths of the state's population growth.

In 2023, Virginia ranked second in the nation in its immigration court hearing backlog, averaging over three years for illegal aliens and asylum seekers to get a hearing.

From 2020–2024, around half of Richmond's 55,000 new residents were immigrants. Thirty percent of them arrived from 2023–2024 alone. That means around 8,250 immigrants moved to the Richmond area in one year. This heavily burdens the rental market, considering, in their first two years in the U.S., 90 percent of immigrant households rent.

Virginia's strategic location as home to many high-paying government jobs boosts demand for service workers, making the state a natural immigration magnet. A presidential administration like Joe Biden's that refuses to enforce immigration law, however, swells the state's immigration population artificially. Many state Democrats also support sanctuary city policies, which act as an artificial magnet for illegal aliens.

Contrary to pro-mass immigration advocates, former President Joe Biden's border surge did not fill the American workforce with needed labor. At the start of 2025, more than half of the 6.5 million immigrants who arrived in the previous three years remained out of the workforce. But employed or not, they all needed housing.

Virginia's Increased Immigration Causes Higher Rents Because of Supply and Demand

In a free housing market, an increase in rental demand causes a spike in rents until housing supply catches up. Immigration creates increased rental demand, and immigrants outcompete low-income Americans because they're willing to live in more crowded conditions. Additionally, nonprofits and local governments often distort the market to subsidize immigrant households, further disadvantaging low-income Americans.

Thanks to Biden's open border policies, eight million immigrants entered the U.S. from 2021–2023. According to Freddie Mac, it would take 1.5 million additional homes to house them comfortably. Until that happens, they take what they can get—existing low-income housing that low-income Americans need. From 2022–2024, rent demand rose 133 percent above the normal number of multifamily rental units completed every year. 

An Urban Institute study from 2017 found an increase in the immigrant population equal to one percent of a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) leads to a 0.8 percent increase in rent and a 0.8 percent increase in home prices in that MSA. In surrounding MSAs, however, it leads to a 1.6 percent rise in rents and a 9.6 percent rise in home prices.

Steven Camarota, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, told the House Oversight Committee that his own analysis shows that a 5 percentage point increase in the recent immigrant share of an MSA's population coincides with a 12 percent increase in the average American-born household’s rent, relative to income.

Increasing the population overnight can increase housing construction and jobs long-term, but the temporary pain to low-income Americans is not worth it.

Vice President J.D. Vance has repeatedly bucked popular elite opinion on this. As a senator, he asked Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell about the connection between immigration and housing affordability. Powell admitted immigration could raise housing prices in select areas, but it deserves further investigation by economists.

Interestingly, economists appear fairly uncurious about the topic, whether from allyship with institutional and corporate greed, fear of being blacklisted in their field, or ideological dogma. Legacy media easily find half a dozen economists to give the same talking points as any Democratic National Committee Communications Director.

For instance, when Vance briefly mentioned the issue in the vice presidential debate—a rare moment when his opponent Tim Walz nodded in agreement—CBS News quoted economists blaming decreased housing construction from the Great Recession as the main driver of housing inflation. But even if that were the primary cause, it would make no sense to want to swell the population with immigrants if contractors already can't build enough housing for Americans.

Immigration policy analyst Alex Nowresteh, of the pro-open borders CATO Institute, flatly acknowledges Vance is correct, writing, "Immigration increases housing prices, and that’s okay."

"We must be honest and intellectually rigorous when writing about the effect of immigration in the United States," Nowresteh writes. "Vance is correct that immigrants drive up housing prices. You can decide whether that’s good or bad, but you should accept it as true."

Nowresteh points to the small city of Springfield, Ohio after Haitian immigrants more than doubled its population in a few years. According to Redfin, single-family homes there increased from $78,500 in August 2019 to $158,000 in August 2024, a 101 percent increase, while the nationwide increase was only 46 percent during that period.

"That has made renters and first-time home buyers worse off in Springfield and homeowners, who are mostly native-born, better off," he writes.

With this, he sums up successful Americans' incentive to keep the border open and poor foreigners flowing. The rich get richer, and the poor? Well… libertarianism isn't for everyone.

RealClear Investigations interviewed two people in Logansport, Indiana who vehemently denied that 2,000–5,000 Haitian immigrants contributed to their town's higher-than-average housing inflation. As the town's mayor and a local real estate broker, however, both had an incentive to not offend the new Haitian residents, whose political and purchasing power will only grow in Logansport if the Trump administration does not remove them from the country.

The pair cited the Haitians' willingness to pack 24 people into a single rental as an offset to the increased demand. But besides the insanitation, how many two-income, working-class American families can compete with a dozen-income clan in the rental market?

When Americans do compete, leftist nonprofits often intervene against them. For instance, in 2020, George Soros' Open Society Foundations gave Richmond a $250,000 grant to provide rent and mortgage assistance to illegal aliens excluded from federal housing assistance. When nonprofit money isn’t available, many immigrants cry to state governments to use tax dollars to rebalance the scales in their favor. Last year, immigrant rights groups demanded the Virginia General Assembly provide rent assistance and tenant protection to illegal aliens so they wouldn't have to live 10 to 15 to a house.

How Mass Immigration to Fairfax and Prince William Counties Affects All Virginians

Heavy, concentrated immigration creates a ripple effect that drives up rent in surrounding areas as immigrants push out natives to surrounding counties. Although immigrants in Virginia concentrate in northern counties and Richmond, central and western Virginians feel the cost when displaced Virginians move there.

Similar to the Urban Policy Institute's previously-mentioned report, A 2017 analysis in the Journal of Housing Economics found that "Immigration inflows into a particular MSA is associated with increases in rents and house prices in that MSA while also seeming to drive up rents and prices in neighboring MSAs.”

This ripple effect leads to rising rents in counties like Chesterfield near Richmond and Fauquier near Washington, D.C., where low-income families are forced to compete for limited housing further from job centers. A report by the Northern Virginia Regional Commission confirmed a marked uptick in movers to exurban areas like Spotsylvania County and Frederick County during Biden's presidency.

Open Borders and Sanctuary Cities Create a Market Distortion in Immigration Distribution

Open borders and sanctuary cities create a market distortion in how many immigrants move to Virginia and where they locate.

At a healthy immigration level, Northern Virginia and Richmond naturally receive more immigrants than the national average but not enough to drive out native working-class Americans.

When Biden increased immigration to three times the normal annual rate, prosperous areas like these became unlivable for many native working families unable to compete with third world peasants who cram in a dozen or more people per house.

Sanctuary cities exacerbate the concentration because they attract not only illegal aliens, but legal immigrants who have illegal family members and friends. When local governments declare they won’t cooperate with ICE, they send a signal that certain cities and counties are open for unchecked influx of illegal aliens. This leads to uneven settlement patterns, placing intense pressure on specific areas, rather than distributing newcomers more evenly—or better yet, steering them away from Virginia.

How to Provide Help to Struggling Virginia Families

An undistorted free market would provide adequate housing to all Virginians at their income level. Each county and city would be able to accommodate wealthy, middle class, and poor residents with little difficulty. The key here is to remove the market distortion created by mass immigration from poor countries that especially harms the Virginian working poor.

First, Virginia cannot afford to elect an attorney general like Democrat Jay Jones who refuses to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It also cannot elect a General Assembly and governor like Abigail Spanberger who turn a blind eye to de facto sanctuary cities.

There are more illegal aliens in Virginia than the population of Richmond. Only through federal-state cooperation can ICE remove most of them and deter others from settling in the state. This would also facilitate the repatriation of many of their legal family members. The loss of hundreds of thousands of low-skilled, low-income renters would instantly heal the rental market for native, low-income working-class and allow more Virginians to take jobs and previously overpriced apartments.

Effect on Construction Workers

The pro-open borders press and "experts" fret that deporting millions of illegal aliens would worsen the nation's housing crisis because one in three construction workers are immigrants. But those without work authorization account for far fewer.

The Center for American Progress estimates 23 percent of construction workers are illegal aliens, a Cornell University think tank puts it at 17 percent, and the American Immigration Council places it as low as 14 percent.

Additionally, illegal alien construction workers are overrepresented in the lowest-skilled construction tasks like drywall installers, ceiling tile installers, and roofers—all jobs any functioning 18-year-old American can be trained to do within a week.

Furthermore, the housing that illegal aliens' removal would free up could easily offset any temporary lull in construction as the industry adjusts to a legal worker economy. It would also flush the most incompetent contractors out of the market, raising the quality of housing.

Increased demand from a growing immigrant population has made it difficult for low-income Virginians to find affordable rental homes. This results in American renters moving further away from metropolitan job centers, a trend that is economically and socially destructive. When Americans who formerly filled the blue-collar and service jobs flee to the countryside, they in turn drive up rent for people in small towns. At every step in this scenario, the dreams of the business elite, which thrives on a loose labor market, thrives, while the uprooted American working class faces generational poverty in a country more crowded, more polluted, and more foreign.

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