Does Mass Immigration Cause Homelessness?

In a major poll taken after the 2024 election, respondents were presented with various reasons to vote against Kamala Harris and asked to say which were most compelling. The second most compelling reason, as judged by respondents, was that “too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration”.

This result is consistent with the dramatic shift in attitudes to immigration that has taken place since 2020. In that year, only 28% of Americans said they wanted immigration decreased and 34% said they wanted it increased. By 2024, 55% said they wanted immigration decreased and only 16% said they wanted it increased.

Why did concerns about immigration play such a pivotal role in the 2024 election? The reason is simple: there was a huge rise in illegal immigration — as even immigration-friendly outlets like the New York Times acknowledge.

The vast majority of illegal migrants who entered the US under Biden were asylum seekers from countries like Mexico, Venezuela and Guatemala. And given that there were several million of them, they were kind of hard to miss.

Whenever a large number of asylum seekers arrive in a country (even one as big as the US) there are going to be problems. One such problem is homelessness, as Bruce Meyer and colleagues document in a new paper.

The authors begin by noting that the number of homeless people in the US has spiked since 2022 — to the tune of almost 200,000. Most of the rise is accounted for by an increase in the sheltered homeless population. (The unsheltered population has also risen, though less dramatically.) What’s more, the rise is heavily concentrated in just four cities: New York, Chicago, Boston and Denver.  

To estimate how much of the rise is due to the influx of asylum seekers, Meyer and colleagues obtained data from government reports and local officials in the four cities mentioned above. (They also used an indirect method, based on the assumption that the Hispanic share of the sheltered homeless population would have remained constant in the absence of the influx.)

As the chart below indicates, the direct and indirect methods yielded similar estimates. Overall, asylum seekers account for about 60% of the spike in homelessness. And this may be a lower bound, since the direct method ignores asylum seekers outside the aforementioned cities, while the indirect method ignores non-Hispanic asylum seekers outside Chicago and Boston.

Incidentally, the migrant busing programme initiated by Texas Governor Greg Abbott can explain part of the concentration of homelessness in the aforementioned cities. However, since the programme was voluntary, it is likely that most of the migrants who took part would have made their way to those cities independently.

A more plausible explanation for the concentration of homelessness is the availability and generosity of shelter services. New York, for example, has a ‘right to shelter’ law that requires the city to provide shelter for every homeless person who wants it.

Since housing typically takes months or years to build, it’s hardly surprising that a massive influx of asylum seekers would exacerbate homelessness. What did the Biden administration think was going to happen?