Some research co-written by the Eccles School’s Troup Howard, which shows that deporting immigrant workers actually worsens the housing crisis, continues to attract significant attention from national media outlets.

“Cracking Down, Pricing Up: Housing Supply in the Wake of Mass Deportation” was co-written by Howard (an assistant professor for both the Division of Quantitative Analysis of Markets and Organizations and the Marriner S. Eccles Institute) along with Mengqi Wang (Amherst College) and Dayin Zhang (University of Wisconsin-Madison).

This working paper, most recently updated in November 2024, has been cited by numerous major publications since its initial release, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times.

And in the past two months, it has gained traction in the mainstream media again, with The Economist and Vox referencing it in articles about how the Trump administration’s closed-border policies and tariffs, respectively, are negatively impacting the economy broadly and the housing market specifically.

The researchers’ paper examines how U.S. immigration enforcement affects the housing market, particularly through its impact on construction labor. It challenges the political claim that immigrants make housing less affordable.

Indeed, by studying what happened to housing supply and prices when the U.S. government increased deportations of undocumented immigrants through a program called “Secure Communities” between 2008 and 2013, Howard and his co-authors demonstrate that deporting immigrant workers reduced construction, cut jobs, and increased housing prices — thereby worsening the housing crisis.

Their research showed that counties affected by the Secure Communities program lost large numbers of construction workers, and that the number of building permits and new homes fell sharply. With fewer homes being built, supply dropped, and prices rose; within three years, new homes were about 18% more expensive, and overall home prices rose around 10%.

This data is of particular relevance to The Economist’s article, which analyzes the impact of President Donald Trump’s new “zero migration” policy — a plan that has nearly stopped both legal and illegal immigration to the United States. In fact, for the first time since the 1930s, as many people or even more are leaving America as are coming in.

It notes that the U.S.-Mexico border is mostly closed, deportations have increased, refugees and asylum-seekers are primarily turned away, and the price of an H1-B visa for skilled workers has been increased to $100,000.

The economic consequences of these actions, it argues, include a shortage of workers in industries like farming and construction; an increase in prices and costs, leading to inflation; and decreases in productivity and economic growth. The potential long-term effects include slower population growth, thereby leading to less tax revenue, which makes it more difficult to fund government programs like Social Security and Medicare.